On August 25, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested by French police after landing at Lebringer Airport in northern Paris. He was accused of failing to control Telegram and allowing the spread of illegal activities such as terrorism, money laundering and drug trafficking, and the most serious terrorism. Closed for 20 years. Durov is currently out on bail, but is restricted from leaving the country.
Why was Durov arrested and what impact will it have on the TON ecosystem?
Following the arrest of Pavel Durov, memes about the current status of the top ten cryptocurrency founders began to circulate on the community. The founder of Bitcoin disappears, the founder of Ethereum is busy dating, Binance’s CZ is in jail and so on.
This article takes stock of the founders of the top token projects, the current status of the product ecosystem, and future potential.
Bitcoin
1. Status of the founder
The most well-known thing about Bitcoin is that no one knows who the founder Satoshi Nakamoto is. Not only is his gender, nationality, and age unknown, but whether Satoshi Nakamoto is a person or a team has never been confirmed. .
In the past few years, many people have rushed to the media to claim that they are Satoshi Nakamoto. The most famous among them is Craig Wright. Because he is Australian, he is often nicknamed Satoshi Nakamoto.
In 2016, he publicly claimed that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, and he continued to declare his identity at any event he attended. There were endless doubts from the outside world, and they all believed that he was a liar. Until March this year, the British High Court ruled that Craig Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto and believed that he had committed "serious abuse of judicial procedures" in multiple legal proceedings and had committed "large-scale forgery" in the process of trying to prove his identity. ”.
But on August 13, well-known technology entrepreneur and investigative reporter Dave Troy stated on Twitter that he had recently requested the FBI to investigate Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity. The FBI responded: “Satoshi Nakamoto may be one or more third-party individuals. ”, which means not denying but not admitting the existence of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto remains the biggest mystery in the history of blockchain.
2. Current status of Bitcoin ecosystem
The current market hot spots revolve around Fractal Bitcoin and Babylon Bitcoin staking. The former is BTC L2, which was jointly developed by Unisat and Block Space Force to solve the expansion problem of the Bitcoin network. The testnet will be online in the near future. You can go to the official faucet to get water or use the testnet to mine. The mainnet is expected to be launched in September.
Babylon is an L1 on which users can pledge BTC to obtain income, and the source of income comes from Babylon entrusting these pledged Bitcoins as pledge 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, which was filled up in just 10 minutes. At that time, the Gas Fee was as high as 1,555 Sats, about 200-300 U, and multiple protocols such as Solv, Lorenzo, PumpBTC and Bedrock both participated and accounted for nearly 75% of the pledged amount. While Babylon is liberating Bitcoin liquidity, another battle for liquidity protocols is quietly beginning.
3. Future potential
Bitcoin has always been regarded as a tool for storing value. It was not until the emergence of inscription that crypto users rethink the possibility of building a Bitcoin ecosystem. At present, the Bitcoin-related ecology is still in its infancy stage. Many people participate in the agreement by providing their own BTC as collateral assets, and the agreement then uses it elsewhere to earn profits and distribute the profits to the pledgers. Therefore, the focus should be on the amount of agreement funds and external ecological connections.
Ethereum
1. Status of the founder
Vitalik has been very active on Twitter recently. He first released a meme of "Ethereum is good" on August 21. He wrote in the text: "Someone told me to do less philosophical thinking and more Ethereum. However, it did not seem to have much effect on the increase in the price of Ethereum. Instead, it stimulated the meme currency EBULL on the chain to skyrocket, and its market value once reached 27 million US dollars.
In addition, he also expressed his opinion on the arrest of Pavel Durov on warpcast:
“I saw zero non-Westerners defending the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, but plenty of Westerners. Definitely don’t want to say they don’t exist (after all, my timeline is as biased as anyone’s) ), but this is my sample so far, another example of the decoupling of liberalism and Westernism that Bruno Maçães often talks about.
He did not choose a side on this matter, but rather expressed his opinions from the perspective of social observation.
2. Current status of Ethereum
Due to the recent high uncertainty in the market environment and the impact of the ETH ETF’s gray-scale currency selling, the price trend of Ethereum is much weaker than that of Bitcoin, and the activity on the chain has also decreased. The average Gas Fee in the past seven days has dropped to approximately 1~2 Gwei. It also affects the inflation of Ethereum. In the past 30 days, the market has increased by 60,288 Ethereum coins, and the annual inflation rate is 0.637%.
3. Future potential
Vitalik transferred 200 ETH to the Kraken exchange and multi-signature wallet on August 15 and August 27 respectively. The community also ridiculed Vitalik for withdrawing money 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 of the Ethereum Foundation was on May 6, 2023, when 15,000 ETH was transferred to Kraken.
The picture below shows the Ethereum Foundation’s sales of Ethereum this year. You can see that the sales have been at periodic highs many times, and this time the selling pressure of 35,000 is the highest this year.
Not only did the Ethereum Foundation sell off, but many market makers sold Ethereum in early August this year, including GSR, Amber Group, Flow Traders and Jump Crypto. Under the huge selling pressure from many parties, the market outlook must still be viewed with caution.
Solana
1. Status of the founder
Solana founder Toly can be found on Twitter that he is vigorously promoting Solana ecosystem projects & technologies, including Blinks, which brings Web 3 applications to Web 2 interfaces, Solana and Robinhood wallet cooperation, etc.
2. Solana Current Situation
The reason for the rise of Solana this time is not only the most well-known Pump Fun and meme coins, but also Paypal’s stable currency PYUSD. Solana accounts for more than 80% of the share, surpassing Ethereum. PayPal chose to add the PYUSD extension to Solana because of its excellent settlement speed, transaction fees of less than one cent, and an ecosystem of more than 2,500 developers.
More than 45% of the supply of PYUSD is deployed to the leading lending protocol Kamino, and the current deposit interest rate is 13%.
3. Future potential
In addition to the memes and the stablecoin of large institutions (PYUSD) mentioned above, what other stories does Solana have? Solana Restaking Protocol Solayer may be the underlying narrative.
Strictly speaking, Solayer is not like Restaking in the traditional sense. Solayer coordinates the block space and transaction sequence in the project.
Think of Solana as a highway with multiple lanes. These lanes are like different pledge levels. The farther to the left the lane is, the faster the traffic is, but the toll is higher; the further to the right the lane is, the slower the traffic is, but the toll is cheaper. These lanes are the 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 require faster speeds and will choose a faster lane, while others can accept a slower lane.
Solayer is like the manager of this highway. It is responsible for 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 the application better use the highway, and receive some rewards for doing so.
"Re-staking" means that these equity holders not only protect the entire highway (Solana), but also disperse their equity into different systems, allowing the applications on the entire highway to execute more smoothly and efficiently. Safety. By doing so, they not only make the highway more efficient, they also get more bang for their buck.
Solayer's latest round of financing is currently a seed round, raising US$12 million with a valuation (FDV) of US$80 million. It was led by Polychain. Other investors include Binance Labs, Hack VC, Nomad Capital, ABCDE Capital, Maelstrom Capital, and Bitscale Capital, Borderless Capital, Wormhole, Big Brain Holdings, Race Capital, Finality Capital Partners, Lvna Capital, Road Capital.
Binance
1. Status of the founder
On April 30, in the federal court in Seattle, the United States, Binance founder and former CEO CZ formally accepted the verdict and was sentenced to 4 months in prison for violating anti-money laundering laws. In response, the price of BNB dropped 10% in two days.
If CZ was immediately imprisoned on April 30 at the time of sentencing, he would be released on August 30. However, CZ had not entered the detention center until May 16, so it is unlikely that he would be released from prison on August 30. The more likely release date is the end of September. At that time, in addition to BNB itself, the coins with high probability of speculation include HOOK, ID, EDU and AI and other Binance-related concept coins.
2. Current status of BNB
Recently, BNB Chain welcomed a new ecosystem development director, and strongly promoted the upcoming meme craze on BNB Chain. Its Web 3 Wallet has added a Four.meme tab page to facilitate users to fight idiots on their mobile phones. There are many more 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 focusing on the on-chain meme game.
3. BNB’s future potential
As mentioned earlier, BNB Chain is all about memes. The current currency is represented by CAT, whose full name is Simon's Cat. The concept is based on the British Youtube animation in 2008, with a subscriber count of 6.27 million. This token is different from other meme coins that use the concept. CAT is an officially recognized meme coin.
CAT is also closely connected with the old meme project FLOKI. On August 20, FLOKI announced that Launchpad launched CAT tokens, raising a total of US$4.25 million. It also announced that FLOKI holders can receive CAT airdrops.
The current market value of CAT is approximately US$170 million, with a record high of US$220 million.
BNB Chain currently wants to build its own meme ecosystem, and the top priority is to confirm the meme leader on the chain in order to drive the development of the overall ecology, and CAT is riding on this hope. In addition, CZ is about to be released from prison and return, and has the opportunity to become Meme currency listed on Binance.
