Author: WOO Network
background
On August 25, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested by French police after landing at Le Bourget Airport in northern Paris. He was accused of failing to regulate Telegram and allowing illegal activities such as terrorism, money laundering and drug trafficking to spread. He could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. (Note: Pavel Durov is currently on bail, but is restricted from leaving the country)
The TON token dropped from 6.8 to 5.4 in 3 hours, a 20% drop.
With the arrest of Pavel Durov, memes about the current situation of the top ten cryptocurrency founders have begun to circulate on social media. The founder of Bitcoin disappeared, the founder of Ethereum is busy dating, and CZ of Binance is in jail, etc.
In this article, WOO X Research will review the founders of the top token projects, the current status of the product ecosystem, and future potential.
Bitcoin
Founder status: One of the most well-known things about Bitcoin is that no one knows who the founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, is. Not only is his gender, nationality, and age unknown, but it has also not been confirmed whether Nakamoto is a single person or a team.
In the past few years, many people have rushed to claim to the media that they are Satoshi Nakamoto. The most famous among them is Craig Wright. Because he is Australian, he is often nicknamed Australian Satoshi.
In 2016, he publicly declared that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, and he continued to claim this identity at any event he attended. The outside world was skeptical and believed that he was a liar. Until March this year, the British High Court ruled that Craig Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto, believing that he had "seriously abused the judicial process" in multiple legal proceedings and had "large-scale forgery" in the process of trying to prove his identity.
But on August 13, well-known technology entrepreneur and investigative journalist Dave Troy tweeted that he had recently asked the FBI to investigate the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. The FBI responded: "Satoshi Nakamoto may be one or more third-party individuals", which means that it does not deny but also does not acknowledge the existence of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto is still the biggest mystery in the history of blockchain.
Current status of Bitcoin ecosystem: The current market focus is on Fractal Bitcoin and Babylon Bitcoin staking. The former is BTC L2, developed by Unisat and Block Space Force, and aims to solve the expansion problem of the Bitcoin network. The test network will be launched soon. You can get water from the official tap or use the test network for mining. It is expected to be launched on the mainnet in September.
Babylon is an L1 on which users can stake BTC to earn income, and the source of income comes from Babylon entrusting these staked bitcoins as collateral assets to other POS chains that require additional security.
The first phase of staking was launched on August 23, with a limit of 1,000 BTC. It was filled up in just 10 minutes, and the Gas Fee was as high as 1,555 Sats, about 200-300 U. Many protocols such as Solv, Lorenzo, PumpBTC and Bedrock participated in it, accounting for nearly 75% of the staking amount. While Babylon is liberating Bitcoin liquidity, another battle for liquidity protocols is quietly unfolding.
Future potential: Bitcoin has always been regarded as a tool for storing value. It was not until the emergence of inscriptions that crypto users rethink the possibility of building a Bitcoin ecosystem. At present, there are many schools of thought on the Bitcoin ecosystem, which is still in its infancy. Many ways to participate in the agreement are to provide their own BTC as collateral assets, and the agreement will then use it to earn profits elsewhere and share profits with the pledgers. Therefore, the focus should be on the amount of funds in the agreement and the external ecological connection.
Ethereum
Founder status: Vitalik has been quite active on Twitter recently. He first posted a meme picture of "Ethereum is good" on August 21, and wrote in the text: "Someone told me to do less philosophical thinking and more publicity for Ethereum." But it seems that it did not have much effect on the increase in the price of Ethereum. Instead, it stimulated the on-chain meme coin EBULL to soar, and its market value once reached 27 million US dollars.
He also commented on the arrest of Pavel Durov on warpcast: "I saw zero non-Westerners defending the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, but quite a few Westerners. I definitely don't want to say they don't exist (after all, my timeline is as biased as anyone's), it's just that this is the sample I have so far, and this is another example of the decoupling of liberalism and Westernism that Bruno Maçães often talks about."
He did not take sides on the matter, but rather expressed his opinions from the perspective of social observation.
Current situation of Ethereum: Due to the high uncertainty of the recent market environment and the impact of Grayscale's ETH ETF selling, the price trend of Ethereum is much weaker than that of Bitcoin, and the on-chain activities have also decreased. The average Gas Fee in the past seven days is about 1~2 Gwei, which also affects the inflation of Ethereum. In the past 30 days, the market has added 62,880 Ethereum, and the annual inflation rate is 0.637%.
Future potential: Vitalik transferred 200 ETH to Kraken exchange and multi-signature wallet on August 15 and August 27 respectively, and the community also joked that Vitalik was withdrawing funds to fall in love. In addition, the Ethereum Foundation also transferred 35,000 ETH to the Karken exchange on August 24. The previous large transfer by the Ethereum Foundation was on May 6, 2023, when 15,000 Ethereum was transferred to Kraken.
The figure below shows the Ethereum Foundation's sales of Ether this year. It can be seen that it was sold at periodic highs many times, and the current selling pressure of 35,000 Ether is also the highest so far this year.
Not only did the Ethereum Foundation dump the market, but in early August this year, several market makers also sold Ether, including GSR, Amber Group, Flow Traders and Jump Crypto. Under the huge selling pressure from multiple parties, we still need to be cautious about the market outlook.
Reference: https://x.com/spotonchain/status/1827057564691132682/photo/2
Solana
Founder status: Solana founder Toly can be found on Twitter, actively promoting Solana ecosystem projects & technologies, including Blinks that brings Web 3 applications to the Web 2 interface, and Solana's cooperation with Robinhood wallet.
Solana's current situation: In addition to the most well-known Pump Fun and meme coins, the reason for Solana's rise this time is that Solana accounts for more than 80% of Paypal's stablecoin PYUSD, surpassing Ethereum. PayPal chose to expand PYUSD to Solana because of its excellent settlement speed, transaction fees of less than one cent, and an ecosystem with more than 2,500 developers.
More than 45% of PYUSD’s supply is deployed to the leading lending protocol Kamino, with a current deposit rate of 13%.
Solana's future potential: In addition to the memes and institutional stablecoins (PYUSD) mentioned above, what other stories does Solana have? Solana Restaking Protocol Solayer may be a potential narrative.
Strictly speaking, Solayer is not like traditional Restaking. Solayer coordinates the block space and transaction order in the project.
Imagine Solana is a highway with multiple lanes. The lanes are like different staking tiers, with lanes to the left going faster but charging more, and lanes to the right going slower but charging less. The lanes are like different validators on the blockchain.
The cars driving on this highway are like various applications that want to use Solana. Each application has different needs, some need faster speeds, so they will choose faster lanes, while others can accept slower lanes.
Solayer is like the manager of this highway, coordinating lanes, cars, and toll booths to ensure that everything runs smoothly. These toll booths represent "restakers" who put their funds in different lanes to help applications use the highway better and get some rewards for doing so.
"Re-staking" means that these stake holders not only protect the entire highway (Solana), but also spread their stake across different systems, making the applications on the entire highway run more smoothly and safely. By doing so, they not only improve the efficiency of the highway, but also get more rewards.
Currently, Solayer's latest round of financing is a seed round, raising US$12 million with a valuation (FDV) of US$80 million. It was led by Polychain, and other investors include Binance Labs, Hack VC, Nomad Capital, ABCDE Capital, Maelstrom Capital, Bitscale Capital, Borderless Capital, Wormhole, Big Brain Holdings, Race Capital, Finality Capital Partners, Lvna Capital, and Road Capital.
Binance
Founder's situation: On April 30, Binance founder and former CEO CZ was sentenced to four months in prison for violating anti-money laundering laws in a federal court in Seattle, U.S. The price of BNB fell 10% in two days.
If CZ was immediately imprisoned on April 30th when the verdict was passed, he would be released on August 30th. However, as of May 16th, CZ had not entered the detention center, so it is unlikely that he will be released on August 30th. The more likely release date is the end of September. By then, in addition to BNB itself, the currencies with a high probability of being hyped include HOOK, ID, EDU, AI and other Binance-related concept coins.
Current status of BNB: Recently, BNB Chain welcomed a new director of ecosystem development, who strongly promoted the upcoming meme craze on BNB Chain. Its Web 3 Wallet added a tab of Four.meme to facilitate users to play local on-chain meme on their mobile phones. Many small and medium-sized KOLs received private messages from BNB Chain, inviting them to participate in the meme contest. It can be seen that BNB is currently betting on the meme contest on the chain.
BNB's future potential: As mentioned above, BNB Chain is committed to developing memes. The current currency is represented by CAT, whose full name is Simon's Cat. The concept is a British Youtube animation in 2008, with 6.27 million subscribers. This token is different from other meme coins that are just based on the concept. CAT is an officially recognized meme coin.
CAT is also closely connected to the old meme project FLOKI. On August 20, FLOKI announced the launch of CAT tokens on Launchpad, raising a total of US$4.25 million, and announced that FLOKI holders would be able to receive CAT airdrops.
Currently, CAT's market value is approximately US$170 million, and its historical high is US$220 million.
BNB Chain currently wants to build its own meme ecosystem. The top priority is to identify the meme leader on the chain in order to drive the development of the overall ecosystem. CAT carries this hope. In addition, CZ is about to be released from prison and return, so it has the opportunity to become a meme currency listed on Binance.
