Take a look at the most noteworthy industry events and important project developments in the coming week.
- The fourth Bitcoin halving is expected to occur on April 20, 2024.
- Hong Kong may approve Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs as early as April 15.
- Runes will be launched on the day of Bitcoin halving.
- EigenLayer reopened the deposit window on April 16.
- TOKEN2049 Dubai was held in Dubai from April 18th to April 19th.
This week (April 15-April 21, 2024), Web3 events are not to be missed. Here is a preview of this week’s highlights:
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important events
Hong Kong may approve Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs as early as today (April 15), after Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that a collaboration between Chinese asset management company Harvest Fund Management Co., Ltd. and Bosera Asset Management (International) Co., Ltd. and HashKey Capital may be approved to offer two types of spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Hong Kong. People familiar with the matter said that regulators may approve it as early as Monday, but the timetable is not fixed and may still change at the last minute. According to people familiar with the matter who told Foresight News , Hong Kong's Bitcoin spot ETF will be traded as early as the end of April, and the Ethereum spot ETF will be traded as early as May. There will be three to four institutions in Hong Kong that will be approved for Bitcoin spot ETFs, and they will be custodians of HashKey Exchange and OSL respectively.
The fourth Bitcoin halving is expected to occur on April 20, 2024, when the block reward will be reduced from 6.25 Bitcoins per block to 3.125 Bitcoins. Bitcoin halving occurs approximately every four years, introducing deflation to Bitcoin's economic model and is a key feature of Bitcoin's design. The first Bitcoin halving occurred on November 28, 2012, reducing the mining reward from 50 Bitcoins per block to 25 Bitcoins; the second halving on July 9, 2016 further reduced the block reward to 12.5 Bitcoins; the third halving on May 11, 2020 reduced the reward to 6.25 Bitcoins per block.
In addition, Runes will be launched on the day of Bitcoin halving. Runes is a new protocol proposed by Casey Rodarmor, the creator of Bitcoin Ordinals, in September 2023. Runes are different from other asset issuance protocols of Bitcoin. They do not require off-chain data or native tokens to be issued or transferred, and the characteristics of UTXO and special data storage methods make Runes have a smaller footprint on the chain.
Project Progress
The third phase of applications for the Arbitrum Foundation’s funding program will begin on April 15, focusing on DApp projects such as games, NFTs, social, DAOs, and DeFi.
BNB Beacon Chain is expected to launch the mainnet Sunset hard fork upgrade on April 15. Full node operators on the mainnet must upgrade to v0.10.20 before April 15, and BNB/BEP2 asset holders will transfer their assets from BC to BSC.
opBNB mainnet will undergo a Snow hard fork upgrade at 14:00 on April 15.
Pre-registration for Private Beta 4 of blockchain game Illuvium will start on April 15, 2024; PB4 Madness will be held from April 30 to May 28, 2024. The Open Beta testnet will be open through the Epic Games launcher from May 28, and the end date is to be determined. The Open Beta mainnet will be released after testing and final adjustments, during which airdrop points will accumulate in all stages.
EigenLayer will reopen the deposit window on April 16 and remove all LST token deposit limits.
The application deadline for Gitcoin GG20 is April 16. GG20 will launch 4 types of project rounds, including Web3 infrastructure, developer tools, dApps and applications, and hackathon alumni, with a total allocation of $100 in matching support funds. In addition, GG20 will also launch 4 types of community rounds, including ENS, token engineering sharing, Open Civics, and Hypercerts ecology, with a matching pool of $230,000.
Solana ecosystem DEX Jupiter will launch the NFT lending protocol Sharky on April 16, and the next LFG vote will start on April 17.
LBP platform Fjord Foundry will issue the token FJO on April 16. The total amount of FJO is 100 million, and the initial supply is expected to be 15%, of which about half will come from Fjord LBP activities. 4% of the tokens will be distributed to the community through airdrops. The airdrop snapshot was taken on March 22, of which 1.5% of the tokens will be airdropped to Copper Launch and Fjord Foundry V1 users, and 2.5% of the tokens will be airdropped to Fjord Foundry V2 users.
Binance will list Omni Network (OMNI) at 20:00 on April 17. OMNI new coin mining has been started on Launchpool at 8:00 on April 13.
Upcoming Events
This week, Dubai will usher in an intensive blockchain event. TOKEN2049 Dubai will be held in Dubai from April 18 to April 19. It is expected to attract 10,000 participants from more than 4,000 companies and more than 100 countries.
In addition, the 12th Blockchain Life 2024 will be held in Dubai from April 15th to 16th, and is expected to attract more than 8,000 participants from 120 countries. Forum topics include Web3, cryptocurrency, investment, blockchain, mining, trading, Bitcoin halving, etc.
Foresight News has compiled more than 100 activities around Dubai, which can be viewed here:
Token Unlock
According to Token Unlocks data, this week ARB, STRK and AXS will have a one-time large-scale token unlock, with a total release value of over US$370 million, including:
- Arbitrum (ARB) will unlock 92.65 million tokens at 21:00 on April 16, worth approximately $94.87 million, accounting for 3.49% of the circulating supply;
- Starknet (STRK) will unlock 64 million tokens at 8:00 on April 15, worth approximately $91.52 million, accounting for 8.79% of the circulating supply;
- Axie Infinity (AXS) will unlock 10.87 million tokens at 21:10 on April 17, worth approximately $76.74 million, accounting for 7.59% of the circulating supply;
- Immutable (IMX) will unlock 34.19 million tokens at 8:00 on April 19, worth approximately US$69.07 million, accounting for 2.4% of the circulating supply.
- Manta Network (MANTA) will unlock 21.67 million tokens at 17:30 on April 18, worth approximately US$40.52 million, accounting for 8.67% of the circulating supply.
Voting Governance
The SingularityNET community’s proposal to merge SingularityNET, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol tokens will be voted on until 20:00 on April 16 and is open to AGIX token holders on Cardano and Ethereum.
The Sushi DAO financial proposal, which is expected to be voted on on April 17, proposes to transfer more than $40 million of DAO-controlled treasury assets to a new vault managed by Sushi Labs. The proposal has been controversial, with Naïm Boubziz, a member of the SushiSwap compensation committee, claiming that the core development team created new wallets before the vote to increase the team's voting rights.
NFT Minting
NFTGo launched its Ordinals NFT series “RuneGo” on April 17, which will be minted for free with a supply of 10,000, which will be divided into three rounds: VIP minting (guaranteed WL), WL minting (FCFS), and public sale.
