Bitpush weekend news review:
[ Polymarket predicts that Harris's chances of winning the presidential election have risen to 52%, six percentage points higher than Trump]
Data from crypto betting platform Polymarket shows that users currently predict that Kamala Harris's probability of winning the 2024 U.S. presidential election has risen to 52%, six percentage points higher than Trump, and Trump's probability of winning the election has dropped to 46%. The total funds for this bet have exceeded US$560 million.
[Crypto startups raised $2.7 billion in Q2]
According to DLNews citing Pitch Book data, crypto startups raised a total of $2.7 billion in Q2, with 503 financing deals. Compared with the previous quarter, the amount of financing increased by 2.5%, but the number of deals decreased by 12.5%.
PitchBook said it expects the volume and pace of investments to continue to grow throughout the year as investor sentiment improves.
[ Tether : Will defend against Celsius 's approximately $2.4 billion "extortion-like" lawsuit]
According to an official announcement, Celsius Network Limited filed a lawsuit against Tether Limited and some of its affiliates in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York through Blockchain Recovery Investment Consortium, LLC, demanding that Tether return approximately $2.4 billion worth of Bitcoin.
Tether said the allegations in the lawsuit stem from a 2022 agreement under which Tether provided USDT to Celsius at its request. Celsius provided Bitcoin (BTC) as collateral to Tether. When the price of Bitcoin began to fall in June 2022, the agreement required Celsius to provide additional collateral to avoid having its Bitcoin liquidated. When Celsius chose not to provide additional Bitcoin, it instructed Tether to liquidate its Bitcoin collateral to close its approximately $815 million USDT position held with Tether.
[Former Twitter chairman accuses Musk of defaulting on more than $20 million worth of stock]
According to Bloomberg, on August 9 local time, Omid Kordestani, former chairman of Twitter (now renamed X), sued the social platform company, claiming that its owner, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, refused to cash in more than $20 million worth of stock owed to him.
Kordestani, who served as Twitter's executive chairman from 2015 to 2020 and served on the board for another two years until Musk acquired the platform for $44 billion, said in the complaint that most of his compensation was in stock, which Musk refused to pay.
[ Cinneamhain Ventures Partner: Crypto VCs are slowing down their investment pace, and holding BTC/ETH to earn substantial returns is a key reason]
Adam Cochran , partner of Cinneamhain Ventures, posted on social media that there is a subtle reason why venture capital firms have significantly slowed down their investment in cryptocurrencies. Most venture capital firms have limited partners (LPs), and LPs are mainly interested in outperforming index fund returns. But in the medium term, the risk-return ratio of just holding Bitcoin and Ethereum can "easily beat" index funds.
This allows venture investors to stay on the sidelines of Bitcoin and Ethereum, waiting for safer and more profitable opportunities, rather than taking as much early risk on startups as they would in other industries, because there are no assets in other markets that offer the same holding yields as BTC or ETH.
Adam Cochran said that during the last crypto cycle (2020-2024), venture capital firms "seemed to be very active", hoping to get rich with participants by investing in "already-exploded" applications. However, several known narratives (NFTS, AMM forks, defi, L2s) have come to an end, and it is not clear what to do next.
[CNBC survey: Young voters prefer Harris to deal with economic issues, with more support than Trump]
A new CNBC/Generation Lab survey shows that young Americans do not seem to think Harris is responsible for the worsening U.S. economy caused by the Biden administration. After Biden withdrew from the race in July, 69% of Americans aged 18 to 34 believed that the economy under President Biden was getting worse. But they also believed that the candidate most capable of improving the economy was the de facto Democratic candidate Harris, not the Republican candidate and former President Trump. 41% of respondents believed that Harris was the best candidate on the economy, while 40% chose Trump and 19% said they would choose third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Relative to the survey in May, the Democratic Party's support on economic issues has risen by 7 percentage points. At that time, only 34% of respondents believed that Biden, who was likely to be the Democratic presidential candidate at the time, was the best candidate to boost the economy, 40% chose Trump and 25% chose Kennedy.
