What's Driving Token Prices? February 18, 2026

AZTEC (+7.2%) - Layer-2 privacy-focused Aztec, a nearly ten-year-old project, launched its token last week amid rough market conditions. The project, which was founded in 2017, has raised over $100M in funding from crypto investors, including Paradigm, a16z, and others, with the promise of delivering superior privacy features. Although the token has held up quite well since launch, many have pointed out that at its current $0.018 price, it is trading 50% below its public sale price back in November of last year. The Aztec L2 launched its mainnet in November last year but has since only attracted $7.3M in TVL.
LIT (+9.5%) - Perpetual futures exchange Lighter protocol announced last week that it struck a deal with stablecoin issuer Circle for revenue-sharing. The partnership is designed to share interest income generated from USDC, Circle’s stablecoin. Lighter currently has $916M in USDC deposited on its platform, potentially netting it a large amount of revenue. Since Lighter does not charge trading fees, only subscription fees for premium trading features, additional revenue lines such as these strengthen its revenue generation potential. The protocol currently earns about $81M annualized based on the last 30 days of data.
AAVE (+17%) - Last week, Aave Labs, the entity supporting development of lend/borrow DeFi protocol Aave, posted a proposal to direct 100% of Aave’s revenue to the DAO. Over the past few months, there have been disagreements between the Aave DAO and Aave Labs over where revenue from the front-end product is ascribed. The proposal from Aave Labs seeks to unify the Aave protocol. However, it also requested a large budget from the DAO in order to support itself, drawing criticism from the community in the process. The Labs division requested a $50M budget in cash and tokens, which is far more than other DAO service providers have been paid to date. The proposal is still up for debate and includes provisions for launching and unifying around the V4 upgrade expected in the coming months.
MORPHO (+32%) - Apollo Global Management announced yesterday that it entered into a deal to buy up to 9% of the MORPHO token supply over the next four years. Morpho is one of the largest on-chain credit markets with $5.8B in TVL. It currently supports yield strategies for a large number of institutions, many of which are not crypto-native. Apollo will also be working with Morpho to support lending markets on the latter’s protocol. Notably, the MORPHO token only serves as a governance token over the Morpho protocol, which does not collect any fees or revenue that are redirected to a DAO or third-party organization. The deal follows last week’s announcement that BlackRock purchased Uniswap’s tokens, as it also makes shares of the tokenized BUIDL fund tradable on the DEX.

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