1. Today's News
NFT lending volume exceeds $2 billion in Q1
Mars Finance reported that according to a report by CoinGecko, the lending market with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as collateral had a transaction volume of more than $2 billion in the first quarter, a continuous increase of 44% compared with the fourth quarter of 2023. The lending platform Blend has shown significant dominance in the market. As of March 2024, the monthly loan amount was $562.3 million, accounting for nearly 93% of the market share.
EU anti-money laundering bill passes final vote
According to Mars Finance, the European Parliament voted on Wednesday to pass a series of laws, some of which are aimed at enhancing "due diligence measures and checks on customer identities," including so-called crypto asset managers. They must also report suspicious activities to the authorities. The new law will affect crypto asset service providers (CASPs), such as centralized crypto exchage, as well as a variety of other institutions including gambling services. Patrick Hansen, Circle's EU strategy and policy director, said in a post on X that the vote was expected and the bill will be formally adopted by the EU Council and will come into effect three years later.
According to Mars Finance, ViaBTC has commissioned CoinEx to auction rare satoshis "epic sats" in the fourth Bitcoin halving block. The current highest bid is 9 BTC, equivalent to about $575,539.06. . Earlier news, on April 20, the Bitcoin mining pool ViaBTC successfully mined the 840,000th block, which is the halving block. Subsequently, an auction for rare satoshis "epic sats" was launched, with bids in the form of Bitcoin, starting at 1 BTC, and the auction will end at 0:00 on April 26, Beijing time. The first satoshi mined in the first block of each halving period is called an "epic sat" because it has potential collectible value through the Ordinals protocol.
According to Mars Finance, Representative Maxine Waters, the Democratic leader of the U.S. Financial Services Committee, predicted on Wednesday that she and Chairman Patrick McHenry will soon reach an agreement on stablecoin regulatory legislation. In an interview, Waters said that we are striving to reach a stablecoin bill in the short term, and have discussed stablecoins with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown, and said that the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the White House all provided input for drafting the bill.
Solana’s annual NFT blockchain user adoption rate exceeds Bitcoin and Ethereum, accounting for 33%
According to Mars Finance, data disclosed by SolanaFloor on the X platform showed that in terms of annual NFT blockchain user adoption, Solana surpassed all other chains including Bitcoin and Ethereum, accounting for 33% and having 1.3 million blockchain users.
Google Cloud launches Web3 portal for developers to experiment on testnet
According to Mars Finance, Google Cloud has launched the Web3 portal on the X platform. Developers can use this page to conduct experiments on the test network, discover blockchain data sets and development tools from Google Cloud and its partners, and learn about the Web3 Startup Program.
Jack Dorsey's Block has completed the development of 3nm Bitcoin mining chip
According to Mars Finance, Jack Dorsey's Block (formerly Square) announced that it has completed the development of 3-nanometer Bitcoin mining chips.
It is reported that Block has been following the development of the chip since April 2023, and has cooperated with a world-renowned chip foundry (the specific name has not been disclosed yet) to carry out the complete chip design. It will subsequently provide Bitcoin miners with independent mining chips and complete mining systems.
Block announced in May 2023 that it had completed a prototype of a 5-nanometer Bitcoin mining chip, the same technology used in Bitmain's S21 miner.
According to Mars Finance, the first batch of six virtual asset spot ETFs issued by Bosera International, China Asset Management (Hong Kong) and Harvest Global have been officially approved by the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission, with the goal of listing on April 30, 2024. Although the relevant ETFs were first issued by Hong Kong companies under Chinese public funds, it should be pointed out that mainland Chinese investors are currently not allowed to buy and sell them.
According to the product list on the website of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, these six virtual asset spot ETFs were officially approved on April 23, 2024. The relevant products are: Harvest Bitcoin Spot ETF (03439.HK), Harvest Ethereum Spot ETF (03179.HK), Hua Xia Bitcoin ETF (03042.HK), Hua Xia Ethereum ETF (03046.HK), Bosera HashKey Bitcoin ETF (03008.HK) and Bosera HashKey Ethereum ETF (03009.HK).
According to official news from Mars Finance, the Treasure Chain testnet was officially launched with the launch of Treasure Ruby. This is the first version of the testnet, and the mainnet is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter.
The V1 testnet includes the new Treasure portal for testing the network through bridges, browsers, and the testnet MAGIC faucet, and also introduces a new “Shards” points system.
Treasure will also launch a gaming-specific Infinity Chain L3 built on Arbitrum Orbit and leverage EigenLayer to provide security through MAGIC-ETH staking.
Treasure Chain is an L2 rollup built using Arbitrum Orbit technology and EigenDA, designed to provide infrastructure for next-generation games.
According to Mars Finance, Maxine Waters, the leader of the Democratic members of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, predicted on Wednesday that she and Chairman Patrick McHenry will soon reach an agreement on stablecoin regulatory legislation. "We are striving to reach a stablecoin bill in the short term," Waters said in an interview. She added that she had discussed stablecoins with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown, and said that the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the White House were all involved in drafting the bill. "This is to ensure that investors and people are protected. We have to ensure that they have assets that support stablecoins," Waters said. Federal regulation can give legitimacy to this asset class, which in turn may lead to wider adoption.
Apple releases open source language model OpenELM
Mars Finance News, before WWDC24, Apple released an "efficient language model with an open source training and inference framework" called OpenELM on the Hugging Face platform. This is an open source language model, and its source code, pre-trained model weights and training recipes are available in Apple's Github library. According to reports, OpenELM uses a hierarchical scaling strategy to effectively distribute the parameters of each layer of the Transformer model, thereby improving accuracy. For example, with a parameter volume of about 1 billion, OpenELM has an accuracy improvement of 2.36% compared with OLMo, while the number of pre-trained tokens required is only 50% of the original. Unlike the previous practice of only providing model weights and inference code and pre-training on private datasets, the version released by Apple includes a complete framework for training and evaluating language models on public datasets, including training logs, multiple checkpoints, and pre-training configurations. In addition, it also released code to convert the model to the MLX library for inference and fine-tuning on Apple devices. This comprehensive release aims to enhance and consolidate the open research community and pave the way for future open research work.
According to Mars Finance, Web3 community game platform Iskra announced on X platform that it has completed a strategic round of financing, with Animoca Brands participating in the investment. The specific amount and valuation information have not been disclosed. It is reported that Iskra will cooperate with Animoca Brands in many aspects of the Web3 game field, including joint marketing activities, and cooperate on other potential initiatives. Iskra has migrated to the Base blockchain this year and reached a strategic partnership with the blockchain game guild YGG.
Nvidia acquires Israeli artificial intelligence company Run:ai
According to Mars Finance, in order to help customers use their AI computing resources more effectively, NVIDIA has reached a final agreement to acquire Run:ai, a Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software provider. The specific amount has not been disclosed. NVIDIA plans to temporarily retain Run:ai's current business model, and Run:ai employees will join NVIDIA's R&D center in Israel. NVIDIA DGX and DGX Cloud customers will gain the capabilities provided by Run:ai for their AI workloads, especially large-scale language model deployments. Currently, Run:ai's solutions have been integrated with products such as NVIDIA DGX, NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, NVIDIA Base Command, NGC containers, and NVIDIA AI enterprise software. In addition, Israeli media Calcalist expects the acquisition transaction to be approximately US$700 million.
Nigeria’s Central Bank Denies Call to Freeze Crypto Exchage Users’ Bank Accounts
According to Mars Finance, in response to the news that "the Central Bank of Nigeria requires financial institutions to freeze the accounts of users related to Bybit, KuCoin, OKX and Binance exchanges", the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) issued a statement on the X platform to clarify that the CBN official did not issue the notice, and the public should check the official website for the latest information to ensure that the news is reliable. According to Cointelegraph yesterday, a screenshot showed that the Central Bank of Nigeria requires all banks and financial institutions to identify individuals or entities that trade with cryptocurrency exchanges and set these accounts to "prohibited debit" (PND) status within six months, which means that account holders will not be able to withdraw funds or make payments from the relevant accounts. According to the screenshot, the Central Bank of Nigeria lists cryptocurrency exchanges that have not obtained operating licenses in Nigeria, including Bybit, KuCoin, OKX and Binance. The Central Bank of Nigeria will investigate and punish illegal purchases and sales of stablecoins USDT on these platforms, especially those using peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions. In addition, the Central Bank of Nigeria pointed out that financial institutions are prohibited from engaging in cryptocurrency transactions or providing payment services for cryptocurrency exchanges.
BlackRock's Spot Bitcoin ETF Has Accounted for 24% of Its Total Global ETF Inflows
According to Mars Finance, Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, said that the inflows into BlackRock's spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund IBIT have accounted for 24% of the company's total global ETF flows.
According to a press release issued on Wednesday, U.S. federal prosecutors accused Samurai Wallet founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill of conspiring to launder more than $100 million. According to the press release, the two developed, marketed and operated the cryptocurrency mixer, which has facilitated approximately $2 billion in "illegal transactions" and laundered more than $100 million in criminal proceeds since 2015. The two were charged with conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmission business, with maximum sentences of 20 years and 5 years, respectively.
Glassnode: Bitcoin's inflation rate is now lower than gold
Mars Finance News, according to a new report from Glassnode, before the fourth halving event of Bitcoin (BTC), 900 BTC were generated every day, resulting in an inflation rate of 1.7%. After the halving, the new number is roughly equivalent to 450 BTC per day, with an annual inflation rate of 0.85%. These indicators make the network's supply issuance rate significantly lower than the 2.3% of gold, which is often an important asset compared to Bitcoin. In addition, Bitcoin supporters believe that the digital nature of Bitcoin makes it more divisible and portable than precious metals, making Bitcoin a modern medium of exchange. Due to the halving, the supply of Bitcoin will be more limited than gold, which means that in theory, Bitcoin will better store its value over time instead of being defeated by inflation.
KPMG survey report: 75% of Canadian institutional investors will own crypto assets in 2023
According to a survey by KPMG, institutional investors in Canada significantly increased their cryptocurrency holdings in 2023, with 75% of respondents holding the asset class. Institutional investors holding cryptocurrencies jumped from 29% two years ago to 75% in 2023. About two-thirds of respondents (including hedge funds, family offices, pension funds, private equity and venture capital firms) have been exposed to cryptocurrency-related public stocks, up from 36% in 2021. Interest in crypto derivatives also appears to have increased, with 42% of companies reporting exposure to such products, compared to just 14% previously.
S&P Global: Tether’s dominance will be weakened if the latest US stablecoin bill passes
According to Mars Finance, ratings agency S&P Global said in a report on Wednesday that if the Lummis-Gillibrand Payment Stablecoin Act, proposed last week by Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, is passed, it will make it clear that regulation "should encourage banks to enter the stablecoin market", and the proposed bill does not allow Tether. After the intervention of banks, Tether's dominance in the global stablecoin market will be weakened. The agency said that Tether is issued by non-US entities and it would not be allowed if the bill was passed. S&P Global said: "This means that US entities cannot hold or trade Tether, which may reduce demand while boosting US-issued stablecoins. But we note that Tether trading activities mainly occur in emerging markets outside the United States and are driven by retail users and remittances."
Galxe launches GAL staking feature to allow users to participate in exclusive airdrop activities
According to Mars Finance, Web3 infrastructure and digital credential network Galxe announced the launch of the GAL staking feature, providing users with staking rewards through the Galxe Earn platform. Through GAL staking, users can access Galxe Earn and use their staked GAL tokens to participate in exclusive airdrop activities. It is reported that Galxe Earn enables direct interaction between projects and stakeholders, such as token holders, NFT collectors, and social media followers, allowing projects to provide exclusive rewards, including whitelist positions and limited airdrop access, thereby enhancing participation and expanding the impact of the ecosystem.
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund takes stake in cryptocurrency accelerator Alliance
According to Mars Finance, Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund has made a "strategic long-term investment" in the cryptocurrency accelerator Alliance. Although the specific investment amount was not disclosed, Alliance co-founder Imran Khan said that Founders Fund has acquired a minority stake in Alliance. It is reported that the investment was completed in October last year and the details of the cooperation were finalized in January this year. As part of this investment, Founders Fund will provide support to Alliance's portfolio companies.
2. Selected articles
The rise of MEME coin from the perspective of Ponzi's three-plate theory
The three-disk theory proposed by Crypto Vedo believes that MEME coins represent the decentralized trend of the project and are a combination of split-disk, dividend-sharing and mutual-aid. With the emergence of more and more MEME coins, mutual-aid may be the main choice in this round of bull market, and retail investors are more inclined to play mutual-aid, such as Restaking, DePin and Layer2. These three modes can appear alone or in combination, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, corresponding to the corresponding logic of starting, operating and crashing. In general, the development of the crypto can be seen as the evolution of the Ponzi model.
Four Pillars Research Report: How does IO.NET bring a better sharing economy?
The sharing economy optimizes resource utilization by lending idle goods and services to those in need, benefiting from the rationalization of consumption patterns and the advancement of information technology. However, as the market expands, negative effects have also emerged. Blockchain technology can serve as an effective foundation to achieve true P2P resource sharing and solve the scale economy problem on both the supply and demand sides. IO.NET is a blockchain-based computing resource sharing platform that generates revenue by charging booking and rental fees, and uses IO tokens to manage and burn revenue. It provides users with highly flexible configuration and optimized workload distribution, promoting the prosperity of the ecosystem. In the future, blockchain technology has the ability to mobilize the value of various assets and bring innovations similar to another Uberization to our lives.
The in-depth penetration of the stablecoin market initiated by Ethena
Ethena is a stablecoin between centralization and decentralization, which maintains stability and earns income through Delta neutrality. It solves the problems of centralized and decentralized stablecoins, escrows assets on the chain through OES services, and uses different strategies for arbitrage to provide diversified returns for holders. USDe is a stablecoin that cooperates with centralized exchanges, which uses differences in funding rates for arbitrage, but faces funding rate, custody, liquidity and asset anchoring risks. Ethena has set up an insurance fund to deal with risks.
3. Project Interpretation
Bankless: Does EigenLayer live up to expectations?
After the EigenLayer airdrop, depositors are worried that the decline in returns may cause the protocol to be overvalued. To avoid large-scale capital outflows, EigenLayer may only distribute a small number of tokens, but this may cause depositors to feel undervalued. Speculators use high leverage to stimulate demand for crypto applications, but depositors are dissatisfied with the implied returns that may lead to a decline in yields. In addition, EigenLayer is also a major ETH mining pool, with deposits increasing by 6,100%. If depositors turn to selling E TH, it may affect the DeFi ecosystem. However, it remains to be seen whether EigenLayer's deposit level is sustainable. If the staking model proves to be unsustainable, it will deal a major blow to the Ethereum ecosystem.
Starknet: Check if you meet the zkSync airdrop criteria
zkSync has more than 6 million active addresses, and L2 projects such as Starknet have implemented token airdrop plans and rewarded about 500,000 users. For the active addresses of zkSync Era, two airdrop scenarios were simulated, Plan A and Plan B. The address ranked 500,006 performed well, most users interacted with zkSync for more than 3 months, and the active months of accounts with more than 10 transactions were concentrated between 3-10 months. The number of zkSync Lite users is 1,864,953, and the Paymaster function is popular, with 765,898 addresses using it. LIBERTAS OMNIBUS COLLECTION NFT airdrop holders have a high MEDIA score.
IV. Investment and Financing
Aligned Layer Completes $20 Million Series A Funding, Led by Hack VC
Mars Finance reported that according to official news, Aligned Layer, a decentralized zero-knowledge proof verification layer for Ethereum developed based on EigenLayer, announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing round, led by Hack VC, with participation from dao5, L2IV, Nomad Capital, Finality Capital Partners, etc. The Aligned Layer mainnet is scheduled to be launched in the second quarter of 2024.
According to Mars Finance, Japanese financial services provider Monex Group has completed the acquisition of a majority stake in Canadian crypto asset company 3iQ Digital Holdings to expand its crypto business. 3iQ previously launched North America's first regulated Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-listed funds and the first Ethereum ETF with pledge functionality on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Monex Group expects to meet the needs of global institutional investors and exchanges for crypto asset management through the acquisition of 3iQ.
Industry innovation RWA platform CycleX has signed a memorandum of exchange with Nasdaq-listed Nature's Miracle Holding Inc. The two parties agreed that the transaction price is approximately US$10 million, and the share exchange is expected to be completed within the next two months. This strategic cooperation will provide NMHI with standardized financial services, provide customers with more stable, efficient and diversified solutions, and maintain its leading position in the industry.
At the same time, CycleX will also cooperate with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) to jointly develop innovative token economy businesses. In addition, CycleX is conducting a token airdrop event to incentivize early supporters. As for CycleX, as an innovative RWA platform, it is deeply involved in asset management and investment. By converting real-world assets into digital assets, the platform increases the liquidity and accessibility of assets and will provide more opportunities for investors.
