Top 10 News of the Week
1. The US announced that the annual rate of CPI in April was 3.4% link
The US announced that the unadjusted CPI annual rate in April was 3.4%, which was expected to be 3.4% and the previous value was 3.5%. The unadjusted core CPI annual rate in April was 3.6%, which was expected to be 3.6% and the previous value was 3.8%. The core CPI monthly rate in April fell to 0.3% as expected, the lowest since December last year. After the release of the CPI data that was slightly lower than expected, traders firmed up their bets that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in September and December.
2. Powell: I don't think the next move may be a rate hikelink
Federal Reserve Chairman Powell said that the US economy is performing very well and has a very strong labor market. There was no further progress in US inflation in the first quarter. GDP is expected to continue to grow at 2% or higher. He is uncertain whether inflation will continue. Restrictive policies may take longer than expected to work to reduce inflation. He does not think the next move may be to raise interest rates. It is more likely that the policy interest rate will be maintained at the current level. He fully understands people's dissatisfaction with high prices, but we have made substantial progress on the inflation issue.
3. CME plans to launch Bitcoin spot tradinglink
Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group) plans to launch spot trading in Bitcoin, aiming to take advantage of a surge in demand for the cryptocurrency industry from Wall Street fund managers this year. According to three people with direct knowledge of the negotiations, CME has held discussions with traders who want to buy and sell cryptocurrencies on regulated markets. The plan, which has not yet been finalized, if implemented, would mark a further entry of major Wall Street institutions into the digital asset industry.
4. Wisconsin Investment Commission holds $99 million in BlackRock IBIT link
According to the SEC's official documents, the Wisconsin Investment Board currently holds $99 million of BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF IBIT, according to the SEC's 13F form information. In addition, the Wisconsin Investment Board also holds $64 million of Grayscale GBTC. This is an institution established in 1951 to manage and invest in Wisconsin public pensions and other trust funds. Its main task is to ensure the long-term stability and growth of Wisconsin's public employee retirement system and other trust funds.
Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas tweeted that the state pension fund bought BlackRock IBIT (Bitcoin spot ETF) in the first quarter. Normally, these large institutions will not buy for a year or so (until the ETF gets more liquidity), which is a good sign that more institutions can be expected to join, as institutions tend to act collectively.
5. US Senate votes to overturn SEC's controversial crypto asset accounting ruleslink
According to the U.S. Senate's official website, the Senate voted 60 to 38 to overturn the SEC's controversial crypto asset accounting regulations. The SEC's previously issued Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB 121) requires companies to record their crypto assets on their balance sheets, but critics believe that this regulation is too strict and actually prevents major custodians and companies from holding crypto assets for their clients.
6. El Salvador has mined 473.5 BTC using volcanic heat link
Since September 2021, El Salvador has mined 473.5 BTC, worth about $29 million, powered by geothermal energy generated by the country's Tecapa volcano. El Salvador's official government entity, the "Bitcoin Office," reports that the country's government treasury now holds 5,750 BTC, worth about $354 million. Earlier this year, El Salvador had installed 300 processors to mine BTC using volcanoes; of the 102 megawatts (MW) produced by the state-owned power plant, 1.5 MW is used for cryptocurrency mining. In addition, the country's "Bitcoin Office" said that miners Foundry USA, Ant pool, ViaBTC, F2Pool and Binance Pool have pooled their resources to win rewards for opening a blockchain that can verify Bitcoin transactions from the power plant over the past three years.
7. Vitalik proposed EIP-7706, which plans to add a new type of gas link for transaction calldata
Vitalik has initiated a new proposal, EIP-7706, which aims to add a new gas type for transactions such as calldata. This will add a new transaction type that provides max_basefee and priority_fee as vectors, providing values for execution gas, blob gas, and calldata gas. Modify the basefee adjustment to use the same mechanism to handle these three types of gas. The main argument against raising the Ethereum gas limit, reducing the cost of calldata, or increasing the blob count is that the theoretical maximum size of Ethereum blocks is already too large and we cannot afford to increase it further. By introducing a separate fee market for calldata, EIP-7706 will greatly reduce the theoretical maximum calldata size of the block, and basic economic analysis shows that on average, the cost of calldata will also be greatly reduced.
8. Lido and Paradigm are secretly funding a new company, Symbiotic, to compete with Eigen Layer link
People familiar with the matter revealed that Lido co-founder and Paradigm are secretly funding a new company, Symbiotic, which will compete in the restaking track. Paradigm is also one of Lido's investors. In the internal Symbiotic document obtained by CoinDesk, users are allowed to use Lido's stETH to re-stake with other popular assets that are not natively compatible with Eigen Layer; Symbiotic was developed by the staking service team formerly known as Stakemind; several teams working in the emerging re-staking ecosystem said they have been discussing integration with Symbiotic, including AVSs and building liquidity re-staking services on Eigen Layer. The main difference between Symbiotic and EigenLayer is that users will be able to deposit any asset based on the Ethereum ERC-20 token standard directly into Symbiotic. Sources said that when Paradigm approached Eigen Layer co-founder Sreeram Kannan about investing, Kannan refused and chose a16z; Paradigm told Kannan that it would invest in their competitors.
9. Uniswap founder: Those who are close to Biden need to be urged to immediately change their attitude towards cryptocurrencieslink
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said that Hillary's campaign in red states instead of swing states was a serious miscalculation by the Biden camp, who believed that cryptocurrencies would not be important in the 2024 election and allowed the US SEC and US Senator Elizabeth Warren to engage in an all-out war over voters and funds. Biden has little time to save the situation. Anyone close to him or the Democratic leadership should express how serious this matter is and urge an immediate reversal of his attitude towards cryptocurrencies (openly support/plan and restrict SEC + Warren).
10. DOJ announces prosecution of a pair of brothers for allegedly using MEV for fraud and money launderinglink
DOJ announced the prosecution of a pair of brothers for fraud and money laundering, obtaining $25 million worth of cryptocurrency, with each charge involving a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Comments pointed out that the case they were involved in was to exploit the flaws of the open source mev-boost-relay maintained by Flashbots to steal $20 million from many MEV robots. Most mev-boost relays have vulnerabilities that make the attack feasible. In the process of planning to exploit this vulnerability, they also took many measures to hide their identities and lay the foundation for hiding the stolen proceeds, including setting up shell companies, using multiple private cryptocurrency addresses and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges.
The indictment alleges that the brothers, who studied computer science and mathematics at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, planned the scheme over months and executed it in seconds, fraudulently gaining access to pending private transactions and using that access to alter certain transactions and obtain victims’ cryptocurrency.
Attorney Collins Belton noted: This is the first MEV-related indictment. It is being parsed now, and there is a lot of language here that applies to general MEV attacks and other MEV activity (IMO). Perhaps comfortingly, false signatures are the key here.
Key financing events
- Decentralized prediction market Polymarket completes $45 million Series B fundinglink
- Humanity Protocol announces $30 million in new funding at $1 billion valuationlink
- Bitcoin native application platform Arch Labs announces $7 million in fundinglink
- Bitcoin lending protocol Zest announces $3.5 million seed round of financinglink
- Web 3 music startup Star Nest announces $6 million in Pre-A funding link
- Solana Ecosystem DEX Project Zeta Markets Completes $5 Million in Financing, Led by Electric Capitallink
- TON ecosystem STONfi announced the completion of a new round of financing on social platformslink
- Tokenized reinsurance RWA platform Re completes $7 million financing, led by Electric Capitallink
- Web3 gaming platform Param Labs raises $7 million in fundinglink
- AfriDex, a blockchain-based agricultural SaaS solution company, raises $5 million in seed fundinglink
- Intensity Labs, the developer of DeFi protocol Shogun, completes $6.9 million seed round of financinglink
- Cryptocurrency proprietary trading company Raven recently announced the completion of a $2.7 million seed round of financinglink
- Zero-knowledge project Hylé completes $2.6 million in new financing, led by Framework Ventureslink
- Web3 AI platform ChainML announces $6.2 million in seed round extension fundinglink
- UXLINK receives new round of financing from SevenX Ventures, INCE Capital and HashKey Capitallink
- Glacis Labs announces $2.1 million seed round led by Arrington Capital and Paper Ventureslink
- DePIN L1 protocol Peaq completes $20 million fundraising through CoinListlink
For more industry funding events, please visit crypto-fundraising.info .
