This article is from "Reconciling the two opposing paths for Decentralized Stablecoins" & "PureDai: Returning to the ideological roots of Dai"

Author: Rune Christensen

Translated Text: "How to compile: Odaily Planet Daily"

This article combines two articles by Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, on the future expansion of Dai. Starting from the trilemma of stablecoins, it explains how Dai achieves two-way "guidance" in the Endgame transformation plan, namely the decentralized stablecoin brand NewStable (specific name not yet released) and PureDai. The specific development plans for these two different brands are also disclosed.

The following is the original text related to the development direction of Dai in two articles, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily.

Please note that the translation is in English. > >

When the Dai plan begins to expand, it faces two dilemmas in the development of stablecoins. One is whether it can be rooted in the pure decentralized culture of cryptocurrencies, and the other is how to achieve the original intention of Dai - mass adoption. However, these two directions are fundamentally conflicting, as described in the "Stable Coin Trilemma", it is impossible to simultaneously achieve USD pegging, maintain pure decentralization, and scale massively.

MakerDAO: Since a single stablecoin brand cannot solve the trilemma, let's launch two brands.

MakerDAO believes that there are two main paths to solve the three difficulties of stablecoins: prioritize utility and scale, and pursue a purely decentralized path.

• Prioritize utility and scale: This choice includes USD-pegged and Real-World Assets (RWA) collateral, which requires integration with TradFi and alignment with real-world entities.
• Going the purely decentralized path: This path requires completely abandoning centralized control and relying strictly on decentralized collateral. Although the traditional view suggests that achieving significant growth is more challenging when prioritizing decentralization, the Maker community has always believed in the potential of this approach and there is a certain demand for this type of stablecoin.

The transition to the dual stablecoin solution of Dai should be a gradual and cautious process, which may take several years to complete the transition.

NewStable will inherit most of Dai's use cases and will focus on mass market adoption and compliance with regulatory requirements for real-world asset support, while maintaining a level of decentralization to ensure transparency, resilience, and checks and balances in the stablecoin system.

At the same time, Maker will provide a second purely decentralized stablecoin called PureDai for users who prefer the vision of pure decentralization to choose from.

From the perspective of MakerDAO's decision-making in the face of the triple dilemma of stablecoins, stablecoins need to expand on a large scale and introduce new users, which inevitably requires a connection with the real-world fiat currency. However, at the same time, decentralization will be greatly weakened. Therefore, MakerDAO has found two solutions by adopting two different stablecoin brands, covering all the different needs faced in the triple dilemma of stablecoins.

NewStable complies with regulations

NewStable will be the main successor of Dai, focusing on rise, yield, and security. NewStable will follow the trajectory of Dai, focusing on utility and adoption, and all features will be customized around this goal. NewStable will be a decentralized stablecoin, aiming to achieve security and transparency by making its governance and infrastructure as secure and transparent as possible.

Freeze Function: In order to ensure NewStable can scale globally in a secure manner, it will eventually be upgraded with a freeze function similar to other major RWA-backed stablecoins. The freeze function will not be implemented at the launch of NewStable, but the token will be upgradable to enable its implementation through governance voting at a later stage.

Dai's liquidity and integrated backend: Dai will continue to operate as it currently does, and if there are any questions, Dai users can continue to hold their Dai. NewStable will take over the RWA and TradFi integration of Dai, deepen and improve these integrations, and make them more robust over time through its resilient and decentralized governance process and transparent infrastructure.

Regarding the specific details of NewStable, Odaily Planet Daily has previously reported on it. For more information, please refer to the article "The Road to Self-Rescue of the Long-standing DeFi Project: Analyzing MakerDAO's Endgame Transformation Plan".

PureDai focuses on Decentralization

PureDai aims to achieve an idealized version of Dai that many Maker community OGs and Ethereum cypherpunk idealists have long desired. The changes brought by Endgame and the specific development needs of NewStable mean that this vision can now be realized without compromise.

PureDai's goal is to create a truly decentralized stablecoin that relies entirely on decentralized collateral and extremely decentralized measures. Its main features include: freely floating target price, highly decentralized collateral, maximally decentralized oracle machine, PureDai's tokenomics governance token, permanent issuance to the PureDai treasury, PureDai governance token burning engine and backing, as well as SubDAO linkage.

Free Floating Target Price

PureDai adopts a mechanism of free-floating peg because it cannot rely on RWA to maintain its peg to the US dollar. Negative interest rates may be necessary to ensure price stability. This mechanism is similar to decentralized stablecoins such as RAI and HAI.

Existing Dai users can choose to upgrade their Dai to PureDai if they appreciate its extreme resilience and decentralization achieved through uncompromising design trade-offs. Advanced stablecoins such as LUSD attempt to achieve a rough peg to the US dollar without the need for a freely floating target price. PureDai may draw inspiration from these innovations, but a freely floating peg is always a possibility and should be the default expectation for users in the long term.

Highly Decentralized Collateral

PureDai is currently planned to only use ETH and stETH as collateral in the early stage. ETH is considered the ultimate decentralized collateral, while stETH improves economic efficiency through Lido's decentralized infrastructure. PureDai's minimal governance will be able to take stETH offline when necessary and may list other liquid collateral ETH tokens that meet PureDai's high standards.

PureDai will launch a DeFi lending platform to maximize the generated amount of PureDai.

Maximized Decentralization Oracle Machine

PureDai needs to maintain liquidity in three AMM pools: ETH/PureDai, stETH/PureDai, and NewStable/PureDai. A portion of the surplus revenue from the PureDai protocol will be introduced into these three AMM pools to ensure their growth over time. The ETH and stETH AMMs are used to generate time-weighted oracle prices for collateral prices in the system's liquidation calculations. The NewStable/PureDai AMM is used to determine the target interest rate.

Governance Token Economics of PureDai

PureDai will have its own governance token, with an initial supply of 2 billion PureDai governance tokens. The initial supply will be allocated to NewStable stakers on the Ethereum mainnet over a period of 5 years. PureDai will not be a SubDAO, as its own governance infrastructure will be completely independent of MakerDAO.

PureDai's initial distribution of governance tokens helps to ensure that Maker's incentive mechanism remains consistent when building and releasing PureDai, and ensures that ownership of PureDai governance tokens is widely distributed without any entry barriers.

Permanently distributed to the PureDai treasury.

To borrowers who use the PureDai vault to expand the supply of PureDai, permanent issuance is offered, which may support higher PureDai demand and growth without the need for negative target interest rates. This mechanism means that all PureDai vaults will have two options: one is for users to only pay the normal stability fee, and the other is to pay a higher stability fee but in return receive PureDai governance tokens.

PureDai governance token burning engine and backstop

PureDai will use surpluses to accumulate, market make and burn PureDai governance tokens. If the bad debt generated from failed liquidation auctions exceeds the accumulated amount of PureDai in the surplus buffer of PureDai, new PureDai governance tokens will be issued to attempt to recapitalize the system.

Interconnected with SubDAO

SubDAO ecosystem will be very suitable for the users of PureDai and build applications on top of it to ensure it has enough legitimate use cases and take advantage of the arbitrage opportunities that arise in such a system. Spark may play an important role in the growth and efficiency of PureDai.

PureDai may be launched after the first three SubDAOs are launched, but the exact order and timing may vary. By introducing PureDai, the Maker community will be able to provide a truly decentralized, resilient, and simple stablecoin product.

Summary

After the launch of PureDai, Dai users will have two complementary options: upgrading Dai to NewStable, leveraging its USD peg and yield features; or upgrading Dai to PureDai, enjoying the advantages of its fully decentralized collateral. Eventually, Dai is expected to be completely deprecated, and all Dai users and integrations will migrate to NewStable or PureDai.

MakerDAO's launch of the dual stablecoin project can not only achieve current growth and revenue goals, but also ensure the continuation and strengthening of the core value of decentralization in future stablecoin solutions. This process will be a journey full of challenges but also opportunities.

Original text: Nancy, PANews

Translated text: Nancy, PANews

Recently, Humanity Protocol, a blockchain identity authentication platform, announced that it has raised $30 million in funding at a valuation of $1 billion. The CEO was exposed to have previously founded the unicorn company Tink Labs, which eventually went bankrupt, resulting in investors losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, Worldcoin, also in the DID field, is facing controversy due to the upcoming massive token unlock, global regulatory setbacks, and the failure of the OpenAI endorsement effect.

Humanity Protocol, a newly emerged unicorn, had a difficult start, while Worldcoin is deeply mired in reputation and business development challenges. The two 1 billion dollar market cap unicorns in the DID field are now facing a new test.

Using the DID protocol with palm recognition technology, the CEO's former unicorn company filed for bankruptcy.

Humanity Protocol is considered a project in the same track as Worldcoin.

As a identity recognition system based on the Polygon CDK established in 2023, Humanity Protocol is developed in collaboration with Human Institute, Animoca Brands, and Polygon Labs. It aims to provide an easily accessible and non-intrusive method for establishing human proof in Web3 applications. Humanity Protocol plans to launch its testnet in the second quarter of this year, with a waiting list of over 510,000 people.

In terms of biometric technology, unlike Worldcoin's use of iris scanning, Humanity Protocol uses palmprint recognition, which is considered to be a less invasive identity verification solution. However, iris recognition has advantages over palmprint in terms of uniqueness, stability, and non-replicability in identity recognition, making it more advantageous in terms of comprehensive security performance compared to other biometric technologies. Moreover, due to the high accuracy and stability requirements of this technology, as well as the high development difficulty and research and development cost, iris recognition has a greater advantage.

Humanity Protocol, like Worldcoin, introduces Zero-Knowledge Proof technology in terms of user data and identity ownership integrity. In terms of financing background, Worldcoin has completed multiple rounds of luxurious financing, achieving a valuation of 1 billion in Series A financing, while Humanity Protocol has also completed multiple rounds of financing. Currently, Humanity Protocol has announced that it has received a lead investment from Kingsway Capital, a seed round financing of $30 million with participation from over 20 institutions including Animoca Brands, Blockchain.com, and Shima Capital. It has also raised approximately $1.5 million from a group of KOLs, with an estimated valuation of $60 million for the KOL round, according to PANews.

Not only that, Humanity Protocol can also be easily accessed on smartphones, just like Worldcoin. The project will release an application that uses the smartphone's camera to scan palm prints for identity verification, and later introduce another layer of security measures using palm vein networks and small infrared cameras for identity confirmation. In the future, this system is expected to be applied to the KYC process of financial platforms, and even enable access to physical places such as hotels and office buildings through palm prints. In addition, Humanity Protocol also plans to issue tokens for payment verification fees.

According to the co-founder of Polygon, Sandeep Nailwal, the Humanity Protocol not only can effectively resist Sybil Attacks, but also integrates verifiable credentials locally into the decentralized validator node network, laying the foundation for building a wider range of blockchain and real-world applications.

After being highly valued and receiving attention from the market, Humanity Protocol CEO Terence Kwok was later reported by foreign media Protos to have almost bankrupted a smartphone company valued at 1.5 billion dollars, burning 170 million dollars of investors' funds.

According to reports, Terence Kwok founded Tink Labs, headquartered in Hong Kong, in 2012. The company had a global user base of 12 million and received investments from Fosun International (a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group), Innovation Works led by Kai-Fu Lee, and Cai Wensheng, the chairman of Meitu. Tink Labs primarily provides smartphones for hotel guests to use during their stay, aiming to offer an alternative solution to roaming charges and improve their hotel experience, while also selling collected customer preference data. Interestingly, one of the important reasons behind Tink Labs' significant shareholders is Terence Kwok's father, Kwok Tak-seng, who is a former star private banker at Goldman Sachs, serving high-net-worth clients such as Li Ka-shing and Guo Henian.

According to the Financial Times, Terence Kwok suffered losses due to aggressive expansion policies, cheaper and more accessible roaming fees, and the reluctance of hotels to pay for the phones they gave away. In 2017 and 2018 alone, losses amounted to nearly $200 million, and later faced a liquidity crisis. According to a former employee, Tink Labs' investor SoftBank was concerned that the company "was transferring funds from its Japanese joint venture to other regions to sustain operations," which led to the sudden halt of a major project. Kwok was reportedly unable to pay salaries to employees and contractors, and conducted a large-scale layoff before closing Tink Labs on August 1 of that year. In January 2020, Tink Labs' European division began liquidation, followed by bankruptcy proceedings.

"Tink Labs former head of HR operations commented, 'I never thought it would last, but I didn't expect it to close so quickly. Kwok only cares about making money.' According to previous reports by Fortune Insight, Terence Kwok also said during the startup period of Tink Labs, 'Once the startup fails, I can return to campus, with the lowest opportunity cost. Starting a business for three months is like getting an MBA.'"

Worldcoin will soon unlock a large amount of tokens and face regulatory investigations in multiple countries.

Humanity Protocol has been widely discussed in the market, while Worldcoin is in a hot water due to issues such as token unlocking, regulation, and insiders cashing out at high positions.

According to recent analysis released by DeFi researcher @DefiSquared on X platform, Worldcoin could become the largest wealth transfer event in this cycle. Worldcoin has a serious inflation issue, with the fully diluted market capitalization of token WLD reaching as high as $60 billion. The daily depreciation of WLD is caused by the issuance of tokens for distribution and operator claims, and in the coming months, the unlock amount of WLD will increase significantly, which may lead to massive sell-offs.

According to the analysis by @DefiSquared, on the one hand, once the VC and team tokens of Worldcoin start unlocking, the supply of WLD will increase by 4% every day. According to Token Unlocks data, WLD will face a daily selling pressure of $31.5 million starting from July 24th (calculated based on the price on May 16th).

At the same time, Worldcoin recently revealed in a blog post that World Assets, a subsidiary responsible for token issuance, will conduct private sale of 500,000 to 1.5 million WLD tokens per week for the next 6 months, with a maximum value of $179 million based on current valuation. @DefiSquared pointed out that this portion of tokens accounts for 16.7% of the existing circulating supply (calculated based on a circulating supply of 210 million tokens on May 16), and they are sold at a discounted price. This funding comes from the "community" portion of the WLD token supply, which is being used to benefit the foundation by selling it to counterparties.

"Worldcoin's token economic model was designed to be predatory from the beginning, benefiting the team and early investors. In December last year, the foundation even intentionally terminated market maker contracts (Note: Worldcoin previously announced the termination of agreements with 5 market makers on December 15, 2023), allowing the price to be artificially inflated under low circulation. According to the latest research data from CoinGecko, WLD is one of the four cryptocurrencies with the lowest circulation among the top 300 in terms of market capitalization. @DefiSquared believes that this manipulative design of low circulation and high valuation directly benefits insiders, as they can hedge the overvalued locked shares through contracts and over-the-counter trading before they are unlocked."

In addition, @DefiSquared also pointed out that most retail investors may not even be aware that Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) is no longer actively involved in Worldcoin and that the project has no affiliation with OpenAI. According to Bloomberg's report in April this year, Worldcoin was seeking collaboration with technology giants such as OpenAI.

Worldcoin is worth mentioning because it is currently facing regulatory bans or investigations related to user data privacy issues in multiple countries around the world, including Spain, Portugal, South Korea, and Hong Kong, China. In order to address this, Worldcoin's main supporters have not only met with relevant government officials to improve government relations, but also open-sourced their iris recognition inference system this year to enhance transparency and implement a new personal data self-hosting strategy. Additionally, they have recently open-sourced a new Secure Multiparty Computation (SMPC) system and securely deleted old iris code to enhance the security of biometric data. Similarly, Humanity Protocol may also face regulatory issues arising from user data collection.

Original Link

With the continuous deepening of digital transformation, blockchain technology is gradually becoming an indispensable part of enterprise operations. By providing a decentralized and tamper-proof method of data recording, it greatly improves the operational efficiency and data security of enterprises. The introduction of blockchain technology can not only optimize supply chain management and reduce transaction costs but also enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of enterprises, thereby bringing unprecedented potential for transformation to enterprises.

Meanwhile, the changes in mining policies have also had a profound impact on the global cryptocurrency market. As an important component of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the stability of the policy environment for mining activities directly affects the output and price of cryptocurrencies. In recent years, as environmental issues have become increasingly important, some countries have started to restrict energy-consuming mining activities. This not only affects the operation of mining companies but also to some extent affects the supply and demand relationship in the cryptocurrency market.

In this article, we will delve into how enterprises can achieve operational optimization by adopting blockchain technology, as well as how changes in mining policies can affect global market stability. By analyzing specific enterprise cases and policy changes, our aim is to provide readers with a comprehensive perspective to better understand the role and impact of blockchain technology and mining policies in the global economy.

Adoption of Enterprise Blockchain Technology

In the wave of enterprises adopting blockchain technology, the practices of IBM and Walmart stand out. IBM, using its blockchain platform IBM Blockchain, has collaborated with shipping giant Maersk to develop the TradeLens platform, which significantly improves the transparency and efficiency of the global supply chain through blockchain technology. On the other hand, Walmart has implemented blockchain technology through its food safety collaboration initiative, achieving end-to-end food traceability, enhancing consumer confidence in food safety, and improving the traceability of food.

Blockchain technology has brought significant improvements to enterprise operations. It provides a real-time updated shared data view for all participants through distributed ledger technology, effectively increasing transparency and reducing information asymmetry issues. In addition, the automated execution of smart contracts reduces intermediaries and administrative costs, thereby lowering operational expenses for businesses. The immutability of blockchain ensures strong data security, guaranteeing the safety of enterprise data. Furthermore, blockchain simplifies transaction processes, accelerates fund circulation, and enhances business efficiency. Most importantly, the transparency and immutability of blockchain contribute to building trust among parties, which is particularly crucial for cross-organizational and cross-border collaborations.

With the continuous maturity of blockchain technology, it is gradually becoming a key driving force for enterprise digital transformation. By adopting blockchain technology, enterprises not only optimize supply chain management but also improve operational efficiency and data security. These advantages make blockchain technology play an increasingly important role in enterprise operations, and its influence is expected to further expand as more enterprises begin to explore this technology.

The adoption of blockchain technology will become more widespread, and its role in enterprise operations will become increasingly prominent. Enterprises will continue to explore new application scenarios, use blockchain technology to solve existing problems, and create new business models. With the maturity of the technology and the formation of industry standards, the adoption of blockchain technology will become more standardized, and its position in the global economy will become more stable.

Global Perspective on Mining Policy

The policy on cryptocurrency mining varies significantly among different countries worldwide. China used to be the center of Bitcoin mining, but in 2021, it announced a ban on cryptocurrency mining, leading to a significant change in the global mining landscape. The United States has become a new hotspot for mining, especially in regions like Texas, where mining activities receive some degree of support due to abundant renewable energy. Russia has also become an important country for mining due to its abundant energy resources. However, these countries also face policy uncertainties, which may pose risks to long-term planning and investment in mining operations.

Environmental factors are key drivers of changes in mining policies. China's restrictions on mining energy consumption reflect global concerns for sustainable development and environmental protection. Mining activities, especially Bitcoin mining, have been criticized for their high energy consumption. It is estimated that the annual energy consumption of the Bitcoin network is equivalent to the total energy consumption of some medium-sized countries. This energy consumption not only exacerbates global warming issues but also conflicts with the green energy transition goals promoted by governments worldwide.

Changes in mining policies directly affect the supply and demand relationship and price of cryptocurrencies. For example, the mining ban in China has led to a short-term decrease in Bitcoin mining difficulty, but as mining operations redistribute globally, the mining difficulty gradually recovers. In addition, policy uncertainty also increases market volatility, and investors need to closely monitor policy trends to assess their impact on investments.

Market Dynamics and Corporate Response

The policy changes have had a significant impact on the Crypto Assets market, especially the prices of major coins such as Bitcoin. For example, after China announced a ban on crypto mining, the market expected that the supply of Bitcoin would be limited, leading to price Fluctuation in the short term. In addition, concerns about the stability and policy risks of new mining hubs due to the shift of mining activities to other countries have also affected investor sentiment, further exacerbating price Fluctuations. Policy uncertainty increases speculation in the market, making Crypto Assets prices more susceptible to market sentiment.

In the face of market and policy changes, companies must adjust their strategies flexibly. For example, Tesla's decision to temporarily suspend accepting Bitcoin as payment for car purchases in 2021 reflects the company's concerns about the volatility of the cryptocurrency market and the environmental impact of mining. This decision not only demonstrates the company's sensitivity to market dynamics but also shows its cautious attitude in the face of policy uncertainties.

However, companies need to demonstrate adaptability and foresight in responding to market and policy changes. On one hand, companies need to closely monitor policy trends, assess their potential impact on business, and develop corresponding risk management strategies. On the other hand, companies should also actively explore new business models that integrate blockchain technology, such as innovating products and services through tokenization and smart contracts. Additionally, companies should consider how to reduce their environmental impact by adopting renewable energy and other means to align with the global trend of sustainable development.

At the same time, there is a complex interaction between market dynamics and enterprise responses. Companies must find a balance point in market fluctuations and policy changes, ensuring both business continuity and profitability, as well as maintaining corporate social responsibility and brand image. With the maturity of the cryptocurrency market and the gradual clarification of the policy environment, it is expected that companies will explore more actively innovative paths combining with blockchain technology, while also strengthening environmental impact management to achieve long-term sustainable development.

Future Outlook and Investment Recommendations

The application prospects of blockchain technology in enterprises are vast. With the maturity of the technology and the deepening understanding of blockchain by enterprises, it is expected that more industries will begin to explore its potential in improving efficiency, reducing costs, enhancing security, and promoting transparency. Especially in the fields of supply chain management, financial services, healthcare, etc., the application of blockchain technology will become more extensive and profound. At the same time, the direction of mining policies may focus more on environmental sustainability, promoting the development of the mining industry towards the use of renewable energy and improving energy efficiency.

In the face of policy changes and market fluctuations, investors need to adopt a wise strategy. Firstly, investors should closely monitor global policy changes and assess their potential impact on the cryptocurrency market. Secondly, investors should diversify their investments to reduce the risks associated with single market or policy changes. In addition, investors should consider long-term investments rather than short-term speculation, focusing on blockchain projects with strong technical foundations and clear business application scenarios. At the same time, investors should also pay attention to how companies integrate blockchain technology into their operations and how these integrations impact the long-term value of the companies.

Risk management is crucial when investing in blockchain-related assets. Investors should set clear investment goals and risk tolerance and make investment decisions based on these criteria. In addition, investors should regularly review and adjust their investment portfolios to cope with market and policy changes. Maintaining flexibility and adaptability is key when facing uncertainties.

Meanwhile, investors should formulate investment strategies based on market dynamics and policy environment. This means that investors need to have a deep understanding of market trends and be able to anticipate the impact of policy changes. In this way, investors can better grasp investment opportunities, avoid risks, and seek growth opportunities in the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency markets.

Conclusion

With the continuous development and maturity of blockchain technology, the adoption of this technology by enterprises has become a key factor in driving digital transformation. Blockchain not only improves the transparency and efficiency of supply chain management, but also brings significant competitive advantages to enterprises through reducing transaction costs, enhancing data security, and improving business process efficiency.

At the same time, the changes in mining policies have had a significant impact on the stability of the cryptocurrency market. The ban on mining activities and the ambiguity in the formulation and facilities of regulatory policies have not only affected the mining costs and difficulties of major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, but also caused fluctuations in market supply and demand and prices. In addition, the energy consumption and environmental impact of mining activities have also prompted policymakers to pay more attention to environmental protection and sustainable development while promoting economic development.

Therefore, as enterprises adopt blockchain technology, they also need to pay attention to the changes in mining policies and their potential impact on market stability. Investors and business decision-makers should closely monitor policy trends, assess their potential impact on business and investments, and formulate corresponding risk management strategies. With the further popularization of blockchain technology and the gradual clarification of mining policies, it is expected that enterprises will actively explore innovative paths combining with blockchain technology and strengthen the management of environmental impacts to achieve long-term sustainable development.

Filecoin Network

Since 2020, the Filecoin network and community have grown massively.

Since the launch of the mainnet in October 2020, the Filecoin network has developed rapidly and has become the world's largest decentralized storage network. The diverse ecosystem of Filecoin includes storage providers, developers, data users, token holders, and ecological partners, which are spread globally and continuously expanding.

• About 3000 storage providers are storing the most valuable human information and providing encryption proofs to verify the storage on Filecoin.
• From CERN to Solana to the Internet Archive, over 1800 data users are storing data on the Filecoin network, totaling approximately 2 EiB!
• To achieve a more decentralized storage service, millions of unique network stakeholders and thousands of people are renting tokens.
• Hundreds of successful and independent ecological teams and projects from all over the world are building on the Filecoin ecosystem or working together with the Filecoin ecosystem to further enhance its utility.
• Important community support and governance systems are funded and maintained by many teams, including the Filecoin Foundation (hereinafter referred to as "FF"), which helps manage the reward program, Filecoin improvement proposal process, and Orbit community ambassador program.

Hundreds of teams invest in public products for the Filecoin community

Over the past three years, the Filecoin community has collectively created and funded many projects, tools, and systems to promote network development and rise. The Filecoin Foundation, Protocol Labs, and many other key stakeholders such as GLIF, Web3 mine, Titan, IPFS Force, ChainSafe, actively participate in the community and continuously contribute time and resources to ensure the development, availability, and maintenance of critical public products, thereby driving the development of Filecoin and the entire decentralized network. The relevant cases are as follows.

• OSS repositories, tools, and documentation: Over the years, Protocol Labs has contributed to the development and implementation of many key OSS building blocks used by Filecoin, such as IPNI() and Boost(), Drand(), Filecoin documentation(), as well as IPFS(), lib p2p( p2p.io/), Multiformats(), and many other OSS projects' specifications and best practices, which now support Filecoin and many other blockchains.
• Filecoin Implementation Development: Developers from around the world have been adding and updating components of the Filecoin stack for many years. For example, three independent user implementations have come together to enhance network resilience by bringing user diversity to the network and continuously supporting protocol evolution: Lotus, which is the reference implementation in Go language and has been maintained by Protocol Labs internal team until the launch of the mainnet; Venus, another Go language implementation managed by the IPFSForce team; and Forest, a Rust language implementation created by ChainSafe.
• Key Ecological Tools: Many network teams have built key tools that have laid a solid foundation for the network's activity and visibility, enabling builders to develop applications on Filecoin. For example, Starboard() has received funding from FF and built the Filecoin Network Health Dashboard() and Filecoin DeFi Rankings(). In addition, Zondax has also received support and created the Filecoin ecological browser Beryx(). Multiple GLIF projects are also building interoperable applications and development tools for the network, including Resource Manager(), Wallet(), and RPC API().
• Help bring humanity's most important data to Filecoin: While most of the data stored on Filecoin is independently introduced by storage providers or data client ends, some public datasets are supported by funding from PL, FF, or other institutions - including Solana's chain history, data from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, and data related to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. The Decentralized Storage Alliance (DSA) is also helping to lead the architecture of decentralized storage use cases.
• Creator Program and Community Activities: Filecoin is a global community, so global gatherings are needed to connect the ecosystem. Hundreds of teams in the community have come together to host and sponsor events, workshops, and seminars around the world, including: Fil Dev Summit, FIL-City related activities such as FIL Vegas, FIL Hong Kong, FIL Bangalore, major conferences such as Consensus, ETHDenver, and EthCC, LabWeeks, Filecoin Orbit community activities, and plans to reach a wider audience of web3 developers through hackathons, incubators, and the Creator Program. In 2023 alone, Filecoin (and Filecoin Virtual Machine) participated in more than 20 hackathons and established partnerships with major accelerators such as Tachyon, Graph Paper Capital, and ETHGlobal!

As a community, continuous investment in the growth and maintenance of Filecoin public products is crucial for the long-term success and health of the ecosystem. To achieve this goal, many teams were established last year with the aim of creating, developing, and maintaining Filecoin public products.

Key introduction to ten public product teams dedicated to maintaining and developing FIL

To foster the development of the Filecoin ecosystem, hundreds of independent developers, community members, and ecosystem teams are collaborating every day. Today, we are pleased to acknowledge some thriving "network product" teams who are working hard to improve and maintain the Filecoin protocol, ecosystem, network infrastructure, and open-source projects. Some of these teams were previously incubated within organizations like Protocol Labs and have now become independent organizations within the innovative network that has emerged alongside PL's development. These teams are now fully autonomous within the Filecoin community.

Today, each team is composed of experienced engineers, operators, researchers, and builders familiar with the Filecoin protocol. They are sponsored by public product funding from FF, PL, and other organizations, and are committed to the development and rise of Filecoin's ecosystem public products.

1. FilOz() is an independent protocol research and development team, focusing on improving and securing the Filecoin protocol, maintaining OSS code repositories such as Lotus, Builtin-Actors, and ref-fvm, and helping to expand the participation of OSS developers in Filecoin protocol development. Welcome to follow their work in the #fil-lotus-dev (50 PPW 2 X) and #fil-protocol (4 ODgwMzM 4 MzMwMS 0 zN 2 YxZjMwNDIzMTJiOWM 2 YjA 3 MjEwYThmNzM 4 ZWE 2 ZjgxYWQ 0 YzQ 5 MzM 0 YjhjZmM 1 Nzg 4 OTFmMjg 2 ZTljMjIx? recommended\_build\_version= 1713460047 \\u0026build\_manifest\_last\_modified= 1713462732) channels on Filecoin Slack.

2. Curio Storage() is committed to supporting, maintaining, and improving the operational efficiency of storage providers, and building new software and features for Filecoin storage providers. Please follow the Filecoin Slack channel #fil-curio-docs( 06 J 30 HHM 3 R) or visit curiostorage.org().

3. FilPonto() is committed to providing integrated support for Filecoin ecosystem partners, while coordinating chain-based infrastructure and tools to make Filecoin more accessible to technical audiences. For more information about the team's mission, please visit filponto.io().

4. Elliptic Research() focuses on the proof and circuit of Filecoin, and supports the encryption security of Filecoin's underlying protocol and proof. Please feel free to contact the team through the #fil-proofs (EGB 67 XJ 8) channel on Filecoin Slack and maintain the Proofs repository on GitHub.

5. Ansa Research() focuses on publishing reports on decentralized infrastructure networks and reporting on digital networks aimed at rebuilding the operation of internet infrastructure. For more information, please refer to their special report on Filecoin, Filecoin TL;DR().

6. CryptoEconLab() is a collective of research scientists dedicated to analyzing the economic challenges of cryptocurrencies, including in-depth research on the Filecoin ecosystem and cryptoeconomics.

7. NFT.Storage() is transforming together with the newly established NFT.Storage DAO to become a donation-based NFT storage program, which is an important step towards sustainable NFT preservation. For more information, please visit NFT.storage()!

8. Chainsafe DevOps() develops and operates network infrastructure services, such as the FIL chain snapshot service, network bootstrappers, and calibration testnets.

9. Filecoin Incentive Design Lab (FIDL) is a public product team dedicated to creating tools, monitoring systems, and experiments to improve the Filecoin Plus ecosystem. For more information, please visit fidl.tech.

Starboard Networks has taken on a new responsibility to maintain and improve the critical monitoring dashboard used by the Filecoin community and Filecoin Core Devs to track network upgrades and identify potential alerts. You can follow them on #starboard or dashboard.starboard.ventures.

In addition to the above-mentioned teams, there are many other teams and funds in the PL network that are dedicated to promoting public products in the Filecoin ecosystem, including IPNI(), Glif(), Public Goods Crypto() (PGC), IPDX(), Kariba Labs(), FilStor(), SEAD(), and more!

These independent teams will work together to continue leading the way in creating new practices and integrations, participating in protocol design, providing public network services, and participating in influential working groups. Each team is built on years of experience in the Filecoin community, benefiting from substantial public product funding from various network stakeholders, and ultimately contributing to the collective sustainable future by focusing on protecting Filecoin's public products.

Expand and support more FIL public product plans

In addition to the valuable plans, tools, and teams mentioned above, the Filecoin community has a new resource for attracting, rewarding, and maintaining public product plans in the ecosystem! The FIL-RetroPGF-1 financing round (inspired by Optimism's RetroPGF) will be launched in early March 2024, dedicated to further supporting and funding the development of Filecoin's public products. The community has nominated over 100 teams to apply for retroactive funding, rewarding their impactful contributions to the Filecoin ecosystem! For more information about this program, please watch the latest FIL Dev Summit talk from ETH Denver (?v=wT9YeFemzPA%5c&list=PL_0VrY55uV1_88_dDYcGmhCcK6Y3eRhRJ%5c&index=11) or join the #fil-retropgf channel on Filecoin Slack (06KSDK0811/p1715072615486319?thread_ts=1715054530.822599&cid=C06KSDK0811).

In April 2024, LabWeek Public Goods(), a decentralized conference hosted by Protocol Labs and Foresight Institute in San Francisco, also discussed new approaches to improving the best practices for financing public goods. The inaugural LabWeek brought together experts to discuss how to support critical resources for a more abundant, sustainable, and fair digital future. Summaries of the week-long event's discussions and speeches will be published on the LabWeek schedule/calendar.

Lastly, but equally important, we invite all Filecoin stakeholders and community members to participate in the Filecoin public product through network governance, sponsoring research projects (20% ask, 20% grants @ protocol.ai), joining the ecosystem team, or speaking, discussing, or participating in events at the upcoming FIL Dev Summit. We look forward to seeing your contributions impact the entire Filecoin ecosystem!

Thank you to the many community supporters who prioritize the collective interests of the Filecoin ecosystem. These efforts to advocate for the public good, combined with the contributions and efforts from teams and individuals around the world, are crucial for the continued advancement and innovation of Filecoin.

Original Text: 原文链接 Translated Text: Original Article Link

Original author: BlockTempo

MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen spoke further at X about the design and implementation details of its new stablecoin, PureDai. PureDai aims to be a completely Decentralization stablecoin, with features such as floating target prices and highly Decentralization Collateral.

Protocol Decentralization lending protocol Rune Christensen, founder of MakerDAO, following yesterday's announcement of plans for a new stablecoin in two different directions, NewStable and PureDai in the Endgame program, today further introduced his thoughts and principles on the design and implementation of PureDai on X.

The details of NewStable (NST) were reported on the 4th, which will be an upgraded version of Dai, so it still focuses on the stable peg with the US dollar, with RWA as a reserve asset, and Dai holders can choose whether they want to upgrade to NST.

What is PureDai?

Returning to PureDai, Rune said that its goal is to achieve an idealized Dai, the "true Decentralization" stablecoin that the veterans of the Xu long Maker community (OG) and Ethereum the broader cyberpunk vision and idealists aspire to.

To achieve this, Rune designed PureDai in an uncompromising way, with the following features:

1. Floating Target Price

2. Decentralization of high-quality Collateral: Only accept extremely Decentralization and fully verified Collateral (e.g. ETH, STETH). In addition, PureDai will launch a lending platform to maximize the supply of PureDai.

3. Oracle Machine with high decentralization

4. Minimal governance: No budget, no contributors.

5. Permanently positioned in Ethereum Mainnet: Layer 2 solutions and bridge are maintained by the community.

6. Simple tokenomics: Promote the rise of the supply side of stablecoins.

In addition, the name of PureDai is only tentative at this time, and the final name will be finalized based on input from the community and future users.

Floating price target

The most important feature of PureDai is the ability to achieve a floating target price, and since there is no guarantee of a long-term peg to the US dollar, PureDai must achieve a free-floating peg as it is not possible to use RWA (real world assets) to drop prices on a large scale when demand exceeds supply.

In order to maintain price stability, Rune points to the need to introduce a negative target Intrerest Rate (meaning that the cost of holding stablecoin increases) in response to a situation where persistently high demand exceeds supply, which will cause the target price to fall over time, thus theoretically maintaining some form of price stability, but this does not guarantee a fixed ratio to any specific coin. This is the mechanism employed by Decentralization stablecoin RAI, HAI, etc.

Rune said that while existing Dai will remain pegged to the US dollar, users will have the option to upgrade to PureDai to enjoy its extreme decentralization and resilience.

PureDai governance token economics

Just as NewStable has its own governance token (code name NewGovToken, NGT), PureDai will also have its own governance token (PureDai Governance Token), which has the following characteristics:

The initial supply is 2 billion

• The initial supply will be distributed in the NewStable Mining on Ethereum Mainnet for a period of five years
• Permanently distributed to PureDai vaults users to subsidize the generation of PureDai
• PureDai's surplus will be used to accumulate governance tokens, which are realized through the Burn (Smart Burn Engine).
• Governance tokens act as a backstop in the event of bad debts on PureDai

The governance token initial supply of PureDai will be distributed to NewStable users on the Ethereum Mainnet for Token of 400 million per year for a period of five years (subject to adjustment). According to Rune, this will help incentivize the Maker community to develop and release PureDai and ensure that governance token owners are widely distributed. PureDai will not become a SubDAO, its governance structure will be completely independent of Maker, and there will be no permanent Token release in Maker's favor.

Link to original article

Attitudes towards Crypto Assets have become an important topic in the US election this November. Interestingly, users not only see traditional pollsters continue to provide data, but also see Polymarket, a prediction market platform based on Crypto Assets, gaining popularity. As of May 16, nearly $127 million has been bet on the topic of "winners of the 2024 presidential race", of which, $15 million is betting on Trump, who has a 50% chance of winning, $14.55 million is betting on Biden, which has a 42% chance of winning, and none of the other three candidates has a 3% chance of winning.

Just a few days ago, on May 14, Polymarket announced that it had raised $70 million through two funding rounds, the most recent of which was led by Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund, and Polymarket's investors also include Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Polymarket was launched in May 2020 in response to the widespread spread of misinformation during the pandemic, and the platform went live in mid-June of that year. Also in time for the 2020 and 2024 U.S. elections, the interweaving of major events has gradually brought this Crypto Assets-based prediction market platform into people's eyes and market hotspots.

NYU dropped out of the Department of Computer Science to start a business and admired Hayek

Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan, 26, once studied computer science at New York University on his LinkedIn page, according to his LinkedIn page. According to public reports, in many longer ways, Coplan has the temperament of a new generation of entrepreneurs. He is an artist who is fascinated by P2P file sharing in an era when people love to share music. Since then, he has been exposed to Bitcoin and has easily understood the Intrinsic Value of a global peer-to-peer asset network.

When Ethereum was announced in 2014, Coplan became an early follower and is believed to be the youngest of the presale participants. Two years later, at the age of 18, Coplan began working on Blockchain projects, and in June 2016, he interned at Chronicled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where his role was to "follow the Chief Product Officer and help decide how the product interacts with the Ethereum Blockchain." ”

Since then, Coplan has also been obsessed with Crypto Assets, launching a series of startups and founding a Decentralized Finance startup called Union.market, which is directly the predecessor of Polymarket. Although he later dropped out of school, he has been thinking for a long time about some of the specific problems faced by the creation of prediction markets and decentralization markets over the past few years. He called Hayek's famous essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" an early entrepreneurial inspiration, and Coplan also drew on longest years of academic research on prediction markets. Hayek's related idea is that people are more likely to accurately understand the likelihood of uncertainty when economic incentives are at work. People read longer and better sources of information, think deeper, and try to invest their money in actual outcomes that are more likely to happen.

"When COVID broke out, there was so long uncertainty and so long different perspectives, [I think] if there was only a free market on these topics, people could tie money to their opinions," Coplan once told the media.

On June 16, 2020, the beta version of encryption prediction market Polymarket was released, but at the time there was high friction for users, only Metamask login was supported, the Ethereum Money Laundering was too high, and the Liquidity was limited. Three months later, with the release of the second phase of Polymarket, Coplan's approach to building Polymarket became clearer and clearer. The platform was ported to Ethereum's second layer, Matic (now Polygon), to drop gas fees for betting. He also designed the system for users who did not have Ethereum Wallet. All bets are placed in USD-pegged stablecoin USDC and can be purchased by debit or credit card.

Just a few months after its initial launch, Polymarket managed to attract attention with a massive $4 million seed round led by prominent investors Polychain Capital and Naval Ravikant.

The 2020 U.S. election became a catalyst for Polymarket. On November 3 of that year, affected by the U.S. election, Polymarket's volume soared to $1.297 million, from unknown to up-and-coming.

Polymarket's volume and monthly active population since its launch in 2020

With more long positive feedback from the community and market recognition, Polymarket later attracted a Series A funding round, which General Catalyst helped the company raise $25 million in a Series A funding round with participation from Airbnb's Joe Gebbia and Polychain, among others.

Most recently, Polymarket's Series B funding reached $45 million, led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and existing investors 1cofirmation and ParaFi, with participation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Dragonfly and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz.

Fined $1.4 million by the CFTC, the submarine prediction sparked controversy

Polymarket's development has not been without its challenges. In January 2022, Polymarket was fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for regulatory violations and received cease and desist orders, including for failing to register as a trading intermediary facility. Protocol to the settlement, Polymarket committed to reducing its service in the U.S. and continuing to operate overseas.

However, Polymarket has also stepped up its compliance efforts. In May 2022, Polymarket appointed J. Christopher Giancarlo, a former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner, to its Advisory Board.

In addition to this fine, in June 2023, according to Mother Jones, a tweet about the results of the Titan Diver went viral, causing quite a few negative consequences for Polymarket. There's a bet on Polymarket on whether the submersible will be found by a certain date, with users betting more than $300,000 on whether the missing submarine will be found "by June 23." This has sparked online discussion about the ethics of profiting from potentially fatal events.

"Betting on someone else's death belongs to which stage of capitalism," one Twitter user asked, posting a screenshot showing the odds on Polymarket. The sentiment touched a nerve, and the post quickly went viral, garnering more than 9, 000 retweets and more than 150, 000 likes. "It's insane. Imagine making money by whether someone dies or not," replied another user, which was liked more than 1, 000 times. Others began to directly criticize Polymarket for opening up this prediction.

The developing Polymarket responded to ethical concerns, describing the submarine market as "irrelevant to any outcomes for passengers." "We understand that there has been some confusion due to the misunderstanding that our prediction market is related to the fate of passengers. We want to emphasize that this is not true," Polymarket wrote. "Our goal is not to profit from this unfortunate event. We didn't do that either. It's about helping people better understand the world around them. ”

"Break through" in the encryption prediction market track, when will it mature?

prediction market itself has a long history, but in the encryption space, the first Decentralization prediction market was Augur, which was launched on the Ethereum in July 2018. Augur was developed by the Forecast Foundation, which was founded in 2014 by Jack Peterson, Joey Krug, and Jeremy Gardner. The Forecast Foundation is advised by Ron Bernstein, founder of defunct company Intrade, and Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum.

In addition to Augur, Polymarket is not the only prediction market in the market, but also Gnosis, Hedgehog, PlotX, Projection Finance, Sanr.app, Better.fan, Feel.market, and many more. However, Gnosis turned to community management projects after failing to meet expectations. Other encryption prediction market, such as Veil, were simply shut down.

Early prediction market experiments based on Crypto Assets, such as Augur and Gnosis, have also been hit hard by Ethereum's long-standing scaling problem. In addition, they all initially used native tokens, adding friction to the user experience. Polymarket has learned from the mistakes of its predecessors.

After 4 years of development, Polymarke has now successfully "broken through", and will even be cited by media reports and industry research on some key issues as a reference for public opinion.

As of May 14, there are longing hot topics on Polymarket's website: Who will win the 2024 presidential election, for example? Will the May 31 Ethereum ETF pass? Will $GME hit an all-time high by Friday?

According to Token Terminal, Polymarket's highest volume so far this year came on January 10 at $5.73 million. The platform experienced a significant rise in the number of monthly active users in January, rise from 1,600 on January 1 to 4,100 on February 1, with a slowdown in monthly active users after April. As of May 15, the forecast on Polymarket has reached $202.7 million.

Following the recent funding round, Coplan said on LinkedIn, "The most gratifying thing is to see Polymarket being widely adopted as an alternative news source." The trend is clear: thanks to Polymarket, people are more aware of what is happening in the world. Fed up with the rhetoric of experts and Algorithm-generated news. In this age of rampant misinformation, Polymarket offers a new form of information that drives truth through financial incentives, rather than luring to get clicks. People want unbiased information. Polymarket is providing this. ”

As a firm believer in market theory, Coplan believes that forecasting platforms are a true way to better understand reality.

Polymarket has attracted the attention of longest industry insiders. Vitalik used Polymarket to track Sam Altman's board exit. Packy McCormick, an advisor at a16z Crypto, has also said that Polymarket's page is probably the best place on the internet to start the day.

Riding on the social hotspots, with the support of celebrity users, Polymarket has become the biggest encryption prediction market, however, to achieve its original intention, continuous optimization of the product experience and avoiding risks and ethical dilemmas are crucial challenges for future development.

Original article by FIL Network

Decentralization storage is growing rapidly, and FIL is at an important juncture. This article proposes two areas where ecology needs to be redoubled and ways in which we can track progress. This article is by no means exhaustive, but is based on longing years of being part of the FIL ecosystem, gathering feedback from users, builders, and the community, and thinking deeply about what the network needs to do.

This article mainly has the following two parts:

• What's the most important thing about FIL in 2024?
• Why is it important and how is progress measured?

We hope that with the right North Star guidance, the team will be able to better coordinate and identify the convergence between project interests and ecological interests. The proposed framework and indicators should make it easier for capital and resource allocators in the ecosystem to assess the level of impact that each team is creating and allocate capital and resources accordingly. For startups, this can help identify points of alignment between broader ecosystem efforts and their roadmaps and product launches.

What's important about FIL in 2024?

1. Accelerate the conversion to paid transactions: Helping FIL providers increase their paid services (storage, retrieval, compute) is critical to driving cash flows into FIL, as well as supporting sustainable financing of their hardware beyond Token incentives.

2. Rising on-chain activity: FIL's goal is not just to be another L1 with similar user scenarios. But as a base layer, it does have a unique value proposition that incorporates "real-world" services. This enables new use cases unique to FIL (Programmability services, Decentralized Finance around cash flow, etc.). The establishment and increasingly long application of these services proves that FIL is not just a "storage layer", but an economy with stable cash flows.

3. Make FIL indispensable: Bull Market cycle means speed is critical, and so is making FIL an integral part of a more long team. There are longest emerging topics to tap into, such as chain archiving, compute integration, artificial intelligence, and the positioning of FIL itself is important. When more long actors use FIL as a central part of their story, the ecology explodes. For individual teams, this means that it is important to deliver products to users. On an ecological level, this means focusing on the teams closest to driving integrations and building services on FIL.

The verticals in our framework are still at a high level, where many long goals have their own set of tasks. But more importantly, there is ecological consensus that this is the right vertical to make progress. We'll dive into each vertical and some of the specific metrics that the ecosystem should start tracking.

Why is it important and how is progress measured?

1) Accelerate the conversion of paid transactions

As a storage network, FIL should maximize cash flow. It's all well and good to have incentives as an enabler, but without stable (and rising) paid transactions, FIL can't reach its full potential.

Paid transactions (at the time of on-chain Settlement) are net capital flowing into the FIL economy and can be the foundation for unique use cases in our ecosystem. Decentralized Finance, for example, does have the opportunity to provide real services to businesses (such as converting coins to pay for storage).

There are two main ways we can rise our paid services:

1. Drive the rise of existing services (data archiving)

2. Expand into new markets with additional services (hot storage, compute, indexing, etc.).

In both cases, we need to do some work to reduce the friction of paid on-ramps, or introduce new features to raise the floor bar (as seen in on-ramps and projects trying to bring FIL services to market). Most importantly, the FIL ecosystem collectively prioritizes the right efforts to make FIL services marketable and allocates resources accordingly.

There are already longest teams making substantial progress in this area, such as CID.Gravity, Seal Storage, Holon, Banyan, Lighthouse.storage, Web3 Mine, and Basin. We can measure progress by helping to reduce resistance and helping to propel them to success.

We recommend measuring success in this vertical in two ways:

1. Total amount and dollar value of data stored in paid transactions (self-reporting section)

2. Total amount of data stored in paid transactions and USD value (on-chain portion)

In the second quarter of 2024, the Public Goods team took the following initiatives:

FilOz: To drop storage costs and significantly increase retrieval speed, newly attested FIPs are being developed. DeStor: Helping to drive enterprise adoption of business-ready on-ramps. Ansa Research, FIL Foundation, etc.: Web3 BD's support for ecosystem builders.

• Targeted funding to directly support efforts to rise sustainable on-chain paid transaction activity.

2. On-chain activity is rising

FIL, as an L1, has more than just storage services. Building a strong on-chain economy is critical to accelerating the services and tools that others are building with. In the FIL ecosystem, we have a unique opportunity to achieve true economic mobility through paid on-chain transactions.

Our on-chain economy revolves around supporting these processes, whether it's automating updates, designing retrieval incentives, creating conditions for permanent storage, or establishing economic benefits for network operators, creating a flywheel effect that enables compounding rise.

As FIL have more long of their own economic activities in the on-chain, the value of Token will continue to accumulate, allowing ecosystem users to use FIL in a more efficient way, creating a real demand for services within the ecosystem.

We propose the following metrics to collectively measure success:

1. Contract call

2. Active FIL Address

3. On-chain payment volume

Some notable creators have already planted seeds for on-chain infrastructure to take advantage of some of these fundamentals (such as the GLIF team dedicated to liquid staking, the Lighthouse team focused on storage endowments, and the Fluence team supporting computation).

Several improvements can significantly reduce the resistance to drive on-chain activity, prioritizing the following in Q2 2024:

FilOz: F3 brings fast finality to FIL, both to improve the bridge experience and to enable more long "trade" between FIL and other economies (e.g., local payments for FIL services by other ecosystems). FilOz: Reimagining FIL transactions (e.g. using stablecoins) for more flexible payments. FilPonto, FilOz: Reduces EVM technical debt and dramatically reduces resistance for builders to port Solidity contracts to FIL (strengthening surrounding infrastructure to provide more stable services).

3) Make FIL indispensable

The vertical is broad, but we believe there are two key ways to consider the impact that the FIL ecosystem is having:

1. The first is high-profile integration, FIL is critical to the success of users and their propositions, and the ecosystem is especially critical to provide the necessary support for these cross-chain integrations.

2. The second is to focus on specific verticals, where activity is high and rising. FIL is uniquely positioned to deliver value, both in the basic elements it has and in its cost profile and scale.

At present, the opportunities of Web3 are endless, and the ecosystem should revolve around on-ramps to coalesce workflows and make FIL an integral part of areas such as computing, DePIN (sensor direction), social, gaming, artificial intelligence, and on-chain archives.

We recommend the following metrics to evaluate FIL's indispensability:

1. Number of partners and integrations

In the second quarter of 2024, the ecosystem team made long a number of efforts to help on-ramps succeed in this area:

Ansa Research, FIL Foundation, DeStor, and others:

• Formation of a new working group to accelerate the sharing of ecological BD and marketing resources
• Share BD resources for FIL ecosystem builders
• Sharing marketing resources and scaling up (#eco-amplification in FIL slack) helps signal ecosystem wins
• Community Discord helps expand accessibility, visibility, and drive community engagement

Final Thoughts

Combined with the above, we hope that FIL's direction in the coming year will be clearer. FIL is at a critical juncture, and longest of its parts are converging. protocol and ecology evolve naturally, and each stage requires different priorities and strategies to achieve the next stage of rise. By focusing on the ecosystem, we believe the FIL ecosystem can take its resources and support further.

We're excited about what's coming and how FIL continues to expand the adoption of Web3 rails. Going forward, Ansa Research will regularly update key metrics on the progress of the FIL ecosystem.

Link to original article

As Dogecoin’s exponential growth in 2021 took the broader crypto market by surprise, a crypto analyst has identified a new Ethereum token that is set to mimic a “giga-send” rally like Dogecoin (DOGE)

Currently trading below the $0.1 mark, ETFSwap (ETFS) is the best opportunity for crypto investors. The Ethereum token is preparing for a major rally as investors show increasing interest in this innovative crypto project

This means that crypto enthusiasts who missed out on Dogecoin’s surge to new all-time highs in 2021 can potentially experience similar or even greater explosive growth with ETFSwap (ETFS).

Dogecoin (DOGE) Price Slumps As Crypto Investors Liquidate Assets From Robinhood

Dogecoin’s reign as the king of ‘giga-send’ is set to be overtaken by a new Ethereum token, ETFS, following recent declines experienced by the doggy-themed cryptocurrency

After the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a Wells Notice to American financial services company, Robinhood, millions of Dogecoin (DOGE) were transferred out of the investment company. Most of the Dogecoin (DOGE) was moved to personal wallets, and some were potentially being invested into more lucrative crypto projects such as ETFSwap (ETFS)

Robinhood’s largest outflow involved an astonishing 164 million DOGE, valued at $25 million. Following the mass exodus, the price of Dogecoin (DOGE) fell by 11.87% over the week and another 1.96% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap

Despite surging to an all-time high of $0.74 in 2021, the cryptocurrency’s value has since declined, now trading at $0.14

Ethereum-Based ETFSwap (ETFS) Set To Outshine Dogecoin’s 2021 Momentum

With Dogecoin (DOGE) recording multiple declines as Robinhood faces potential regulatory hurdles, investors are turning to a new bullish Ethereum token unaffected by market volatility and regulatory uncertainty. Recently, ETFSwap (ETFS), a trailblazing decentralized trading platform, has been making waves in the industry, garnering the attention of institutional and retail investors

Not only has its presale exceeded expectations, but its underlying technology and infrastructure have set it apart from competitors in the crypto space.

As a decentralized exchange, ETFSwap (ETFS) enables users to swap cryptocurrencies for traditional ETFs that have been turned into tokenized digital assets. Given that ETFs constitute a multi-trillion dollar industry, ETFSwap (ETFS) offers investors the opportunity to potentially make considerable returns from this low-risk asset class

Users can buy and trade ETFs on ETFSwap, potentially amplifying their trading profits by taking advantage of trading benefits in the platform, including up to 10x leverage on all trades and a whopping 50x leverage on every ETF listed on the platform

This platform eliminates the need for KYC verifications, effectively cutting off the interference of third-party entities like financial institutions and regulators. ETFSwap (ETFS) is also a highly reliable and safe trading platform, leveraging blockchain technology to ensure transparency and security.

Currently, the price of ETFS, the native token of the ETFSwap eco is priced below the $0.1 price mark. However, due to the increased demand and interest in the cryptocurrency, investors and analysts believe that ETFS is poised to experience an explosive rally, potentially surpassing that of Dogecoin (DOGE) during its rally in 2021

Unlike Dogecoin (DOGE), which tends to fall during periods of high volatility, ETFS is a deflationary token that has a stronger resistance to market fluctuations, making it a powerful competitor in the ever-changing crypto market

ETFSwap (ETFS) presale is currently ongoing, and early investors can take advantage of the first presale stage to purchase tokens at a modest price of $0.00854. During the second presale stage, the token is set to skyrocket to $0.01831

Currently, over 60 million ETFS tokens have been sold in just the first presale stage. The increased demand for this Trade-to-Earn token underscores investors’ confidence in ETFSwap’s future and revolutionary capabilities

For more information about the ETFS Presale:

Visit ETFSwap Presale

Join The ETFSwap Community

You're reading the weekly industry hotspot report generated for you by Gate.io AI Lab. Get an overview of the most noteworthy market trends and important events of the week, and recommend investment analysis and financial strategies for you.

Word Count: 4529 words | Reading time 9.7 minutes.

Table of Contents

1. The general trend of the market
2. Analysis of capital and price Fluctuation
3. Major events
4. Recent hot topics
5. The latest developments in global policies and regulations
6. Investment Analysis

1. The general trend of the market

1.1. Market sentiment

• According to the latest data, Bitcoin experienced a short-term pullback after the halving, but then quickly rebounded to a sideways range. The overall market sentiment is cautiously optimistic.
• The Fear & Greed Index shows that Bitcoin is currently in the "greed" zone, but has cooled from its all-time highs. This indicates that investor sentiment is becoming more rational.
• The alt market is fragmented, with some popular concept coins performing actively. But overall, funds are still dominated by Bitcoin, and alt capital inflows are relatively lagging behind.

1.2. Macroeconomic impacts

• Recent inflation data has exceeded expectations and Fed officials have highlighted the need to keep Intrerest Rate at high levels, adding to concerns about the path of interest rate hikes.
• Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East have boosted safe-haven demand, benefiting safe-haven assets such as gold and the US dollar. But it also exacerbates the risk of a global economic slowdown.
• Overall, uncertainty in the macro environment continues to rise, which may dampen the performance of risk assets and put some pressure on the Crypto Assets market.

2. Analysis of capital and price Fluctuation

2.1. Price Fluctuation Analysis

• Bitcoin experienced wild Fluctuations in the last week. According to the research report, Bitcoin prices fell sharply fall 11% at the beginning of the week, fall to around $57,000, hitting a two-month low. This is mainly due to the fact that Bitcoin Halving events are approaching, and investors are "buying on rumors and selling on facts" in advance. However, Bitcoin quickly rebounded and returned above $65,000 by the end of the week.
• Volume data shows a marked increase in trading activity during periods of price falls, indicating a shift in market sentiment to caution. But after the price rebound, volume declined, reflecting investors' disagreement on the outlook. In general, the price Fluctuation of Bitcoin has increased and may remain high in the short term.

2.2 Funding analysis

• The data shows that during the fall of Bitcoin prices, there was a large outflow of funds from the Spot Bitcoin ETF. Among them, the Grayscale Trust Fund GBTC had a net outflow of more than $560 million that week. At the same time, other Bitcoin ETF products such as Fidelity and Bitwise saw net inflows.
• Looking at the investor base, institutional investors seem to "buy by hearsay, sell by facts" before and after the Halving, resulting in large outflows. Retail investors, on the other hand, bought the dips at the dips, fueling the later Rebound.
• Overall, Bitcoin Halving events have triggered a sharp Fluctuation in funding. Outflows from institutional investors are likely to weigh on prices in the short term, while retail investor inflows may supporting price stabilization.

3. Major events

Bitcoin Fourth Halving Completed

On April 20, 2024, the fourth Halving of Bitcoin was successfully completed. This is an important milestone in Bitcoin's history, with the number of new Bitcoins issued Halving to 6.25 per block. Halving event will affect the supply of Bitcoin and may push prices pump. But in the short term, Bitcoin has seen a sharp pullback to around $60,000.

US SEC Approved Bitcoin Options ETF

According to reports, the U.S. SEC will issue a resolution on BlackRock's Bitcoin Spot ETF Options transaction application on April 24. If approved, it will be the first Bitcoin Options ETF product in the United States. The launch of the Options ETF will provide more long investment vehicles for institutional investors and is expected to further promote the development of the Bitcoin market.

Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission will approve Bitcoin Spot ETF

The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission plans to listing Spot Bitcoin ETF in Hong Kong. This will be the first Bitcoin Spot ETF product in Asia, marking the rise demand for Crypto Assets investment vehicles in the Asian market. The launch of the Spot ETF will provide investors with more convenient investment channels.

Shiba Inu Raises $12 Million to Develop Privacy Chain

Shiba Inu raised $12 million through the sale of its un issuance Token TREAT to non-U.S. The funds will be used to develop its new privacy-focused Layer 3 Blockchain. The initiative aims to address privacy and trust concerns while complying with regulatory requirements.

CoinShares: $206 million in digital asset investment product outflows last week

According to CoinShares data, digital asset investment products last week saw a total outflow of $206 million for the second consecutive week. Among them, Bitcoin outflows of $192 million and Ethereum outflows of $34 million. This reflects investors' wait-and-see sentiment towards the Crypto Assets market.

Thailand to block unauthorized encryption platforms

Thai authorities decided to block "unauthorized" encryption platforms in order to improve the efficiency of law enforcement and tackle online crime. This move aims to strengthen the supervision of the Crypto Assets market and maintain market order.

Mina plans for a Berkeley upgrade on June 4th

The lightweight Blockchain network Mina is scheduled to undergo a Berkeley upgrade on June 4 to enhance the ZK Programmability of the Mina network. This technology upgrade will improve the performance and functionality of the network, which will benefit the long-term development of the project.

LightLink Airdrop Token to Mocaverse NFT holders

Ethereum Layer 2 network LightLink will Airdrop LL Token to Mocaverse NFT holders, and will receive 1,000 LL for each Mocaverse NFT. This Airdrop campaign aims to incentivize the community and increase the liquidity of Tokens.

ApeCoin Launches NFT Launchpad Proposal Voting

The ApeCoin DAO community launched a vote on the "NFT Launchpad Powered by APE" proposal, which aims to enhance the utility and adoption of APE as a Token by facilitating the creation and trading of NFTs. The proposal reflects the development direction of the ApeCoin ecosystem.

4. Recent hot topics

Roaring Kitty returns to spark MEME coin craze

Twitter user @Roaring Kitty (Keith Gill) was the initiator of the 2021 retail confrontation Airdrop that drove GameStop's stock price to a surge. On May 13, he tweeted a large number of small videos suggesting that the community was once again starting a new retail revolution. Affected by this, related MEME coin such as KITTY and GME ushered in a wave of big pump. However, most of the long are related MEME coin no one trades, and only a few have some volume.

Sui Chain Integration Netki DeFi Compliance Oracle Machine

The Sui Chain will integrate Netki's DeFi Compliance Oracle Machine to provide real-time KYC/AML, Wallet filtering, financial transaction monitoring, securities Compliance, and tax Compliance for DeFi protocol on Sui. The solution combines on-chain and off-chain data to ensure that every transaction meets institutional risk and regulatory standards, helping to drive DeFi to be safer and more accessible on a global scale.

After Bitcoin Halving Miner income does not decrease but increases temporarily

Adam, a Greeks.live macro researcher, said that Bitcoin successfully completed the Halving last Saturday, the market was relatively stable, and some hot projects pushed up the BTC Money Laundering, making the Miner's income temporarily increase instead of falling. There are few macro events and data this week, the market is still based on the trend of US stocks, and risk assets can still see significant fluctuations.

CoinShares: $206 million in digital asset investment product outflows last week

According to CoinShares data, digital asset investment product outflows totaled $206 million for the second consecutive week last week, and ETP volume fell slightly to $18 billion. The outflow of Bitcoin investment products was $192 million, and the outflow of shorting Bitcoin products was $0.3 million. Ethereum had an outflow of $34 million, the sixth consecutive week of outflows.

Cyber upgraded from protocol to social Layer 2 chain

CyberConnect, a new social public chain built based on the OP Stack, was officially launched. Cyber chooses to build on the OP Stack and join the Optimism super chain family, which can connect the resources behind the OP Stack alliance and share users and liquidity. At the same time, the RaaS service based on Altlayer can drop the availability of DA data outside Ethereum and reduce application construction and operation and maintenance costs.

5. The latest developments in global policies and regulations

Policy & Regulatory Updates

• The U.S. Congress is about to vote on the 21st Century Financial Innovation and Technology Act (FIT21), which aims to establish clear federal regulatory rules for the digital asset market.
• China's Central Bank has included the trading of government bonds in its open market operation tools to regulate market supply and demand and promote the smooth operation of yields.
• The Securities and Futures Commission of India (SEC) has recommended that longest regulators should monitor Crypto Assets trading activities in the country.

6. Investment analysis

6.1. Investment recommendations

The market trend shows that the Bitcoin Halving event has been completed, and the Crypto Assets market as a whole shows a volatile upward trend. Popular news includes Ethereum ETF's upcoming listing in Hong Kong, Shiba Inu's $12 million raises to develop a new chain, and more.

According to market analysis, the following 5 Crypto Assets have great rise potential:

This chart shows the price movements of Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and DOGEB (SHIB) over the past 7 days. The price action of Bitcoin and Ethereum is shown on the left y-axis, while the price action of Doge is shown on the right-hand y-axis. As you can see from the chart, the price Fluctuation of Bitcoin and Ethereum is large, while Dogecoin is relatively stable. Overall, the price trends of Bitcoin and Ethereum are broadly consistent.

**Disclaimer: The above recommendations are based on current market analysis only and are not financial advice, and investment should be done with caution and at your own risk. **

6.2. Long-term investment strategy

For long-term investors, it is recommended to pay attention to encryption asset projects with practical application value, such as Ethereum, Polkadot, etc. The technological development of these projects is promising and is expected to become the future Blockchain infrastructure. At the same time, we should also pay close attention to changes in regulatory policies and do a good job in risk management. Diversify your portfolio appropriately and control the proportion of investments in a single asset. Develop a long-term investment plan, adhere to the concept of value investment, and avoid speculation.

**Risk Warning: Encryption asset market Fluctuation is fierce, investment needs to be cautious. Before investing, you should fully understand the project and evaluate the risks and benefits. Investment is risky, and you need to be cautious when entering the market. **

6.3. Financial wealth management products

Yu coin Bao is a coin interest-bearing product launched by Gate.io, and users can subscribe to Yu coin Treasure with idle funds to obtain Interest income. Key features include: deposit-and-go, Interest compound interest, custom lending Intrerest Rate, and more. After the user subscribes, the system will determine whether the loan is successful and calculate the interest every hour according to the Intrerest Rate set by the user and the actual borrowing demand. The total amount of USDT in the remaining coin treasure is 1.077 billion USDT, and the estimated APR rate of return is 5.85%+8.87%.

The main wealth management products of Yu coin treasure are as follows:

6.4. Asset allocation Risk Management strategy

1. Set a stop loss:

• Set a reasonable stop loss for each investment to control potential losses.
• Stop loss levels can be adjusted according to individual risk appetite and investment goals.

2. Diversification:

• Diversify your assets into different types of assets, such as stocks, bonds, Crypto Assets, etc.
• Diversify within the same asset class, investing in different sectors and geographies.

3. Periodic Assessment and Adjustment:

• Conduct a comprehensive review of the portfolio at least once every six months.
• Adjust asset allocation in a timely manner based on market changes and new investment opportunities.
• Maintain a dynamic balance of your portfolio to achieve stable returns over the long term.

By adopting the above Risk Management measures, the safety and soundness of asset allocation can be improved, risks can be effectively controlled, and long-term stable value-added can be achieved.

By Foresight News, Alex Liu

Solana is a high-performance Blockchain platform designed to support dApps, known for its speed and scalability, which is made possible by a unique Consensus Mechanism and architectural design. In this article, we will use Ethereum as a comparison object and briefly introduce the characteristics of the Solana smart contracts programming model.

Smart contracts, on-chain programs:

A program that runs on Ethereum is called a smart contract, and it is a series of codes (functions) and data (states) located at a specific address on Ethereum. Smart contracts are also Ethereum accounts, called contract accounts, which have balances and can be traded objects, but cannot be manipulated by humans and are deployed on the network to run as programs.

The executable code that runs on Solana is called an on-chain program, and they interpret the instructions sent in each transaction. These programs can be deployed directly to the network core as native programs, or released as SPL programs by anyone.

Instructions:* Instructions are a term specific to Solana on-chain programs. On-chain programs consist of instructions, the smallest unit in which a specific operation is performed: each Solana transaction contains one or longer instructions. Instructions specify the actions to be performed, including calling specific on-chain programs, passing accounts, entering lists, and providing byte arrays. Instructions have computational limitations, so on-chain programs should be optimized to use a small number of computational units, or split expensive operations into longer instructions.

Native Program: A native program that provides the functionality required to validate the Node. The most famous of these is the Program, which manages the creation of new accounts and the transfer of SOL between two accounts. SPL program: defines a series of on-chain activities, including token creation, exchange, lending, as well as the creation of staking pools, maintenance of on-chain domain name resolution services, etc. Among them, the SPL Token Program is used for Token operations, while the Associated Token Account Program is often used to write other custom programs.

You call it a smart contract, I call it an on-chain program, everyone says it differently, but they both refer to the code running on the Blockchain. Zhang San, Li Si, and Wang Mazi are all personal names, and other aspects have to be examined in terms of quality.

Account model, data decoupling:

Similar to Ethereum, Solana is also a Blockchain based on an account model, but Solana provides a different set of account models than Ethereum that stores data in different ways.

In Solana, accounts can hold wallet information and other data, and the fields defined by the account include Lamports (account balance), Owner (account owner), utable (executable account), and Data (data stored by the account). Each account designates a program as its owner to distinguish which program the account uses as a state store. These on-chain programs are read-only or stateless: the program account (executable account) only stores BPF bytecode and does not store any state, and the program stores the state in other independent accounts (non-executable accounts), that is, Solana's programming model decouples code and data.

The Ethereum account is primarily a reference to the EVM state, which smart contracts both the code logic and the need to store the user's data. **This is often considered a design flaw left over from the EVM's history.

Don't underestimate the difference! Solana smart contracts are fundamentally harder to attack than Blockchain with a coupled programming model, such as Ethereum:

In Ethereum, the smart contracts "owner" is a global variable that corresponds one-to-one to the smart contracts. Therefore, calling a function may directly change the "owner" of the contract.

In Solana, the "owner" of a smart contract is the data associated with the account, not a global variable. An account can have longer owners instead of being linked one-to-one. To exploit the security vulnerabilities of smart contracts, attackers need to not only find the problematic function, but also prepare the "correct" account to call the function. This step is not easy, as Solana smart contracts typically involves long input account and manages the relationship between them through constraints such as account1.owner==account2.key. The process from "preparing the right accounts" to "launching an attack" is enough for security monitors to proactively detect suspicious transactions that create "fake" accounts related to smart contracts before an attack.

Ethereum's smart contracts are like a vault that uses a unique password, and as long as you get this password, you can get full ownership; Solana, on the other hand, is a vault with longest passwords, but to get permissions, you must not only find a way to get the password, but also figure out the corresponding number of the password before you can open the lock.

Programming Languages

Rust is the primary programming language for developing smart contracts on Solana. Because of its performance and security features, it is suitable for high-risk environments of Blockchain and smart contracts. Solana also supports C, C++, and other (very uncommon) languages. SDKs for Rust and C are officially provided to support the development of on-chain programs. Developers can use tools to compile programs into Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) bytecode (files with .so extensions) and deploy them to Solana on-chain to execute the smart contracts logic through the Sealevel parallel smart contracts runtime.

Because the Rust language itself is difficult to get started with, and it is not customized for Blockchain development, long there are many requirements that require reinventing the wheel and code redundancy. Xu long long's newly created programming language dedicated to Blockchain development is based on Rust, such as Cairo (Starknet), Move (Sui, Aptos).

Many long projects in production use the Anchor framework

The Ethereum smart contracts is mainly developed in the Solidity language (the syntax is similar to java, and the code files are extended with .sol). Due to the relatively simple syntax and more mature development tools (Hardhat framework, Remix IDE...). Usually we think that Ethereum is a simpler and faster development experience, while Solana development is more difficult to get started. So despite the popularity of Solana right now, the number of developers in Ethereum is still far long than Solana.

In certain road conditions, top-of-the-line cars don't run as fast as modified cars. Rust is like a top-of-the-line racing car, which strongly guarantees the performance and safety of Solana, but instead of developing this track for on-chain programs, it has caused the difficulty of driving (development) to rise. Adopting a Rust-based public chain that develops a custom language for the on-chain is equivalent to modifying the car to make it more adaptable to road conditions. Solana is at a disadvantage at this point.

Summary

Solana's smart contracts programming model is innovative. It provides a stateless approach to smart contracts development, with Rust as the primary programming language, and an architecture that separates logic from state, providing a powerful environment for developers to build and deploy smart contracts, ensuring security and performance, but it is difficult to develop. With a focus on high throughput, low cost, and scalability, Solana remains the current choice for developers looking to create high-performance dApps.

Reference Link

As the digital money market continues to evolve, we have witnessed a significant recent rebound in Bitcoin prices, a change that has attracted a lot of attention from investors around the world. As of May 17, Bitcoin not only achieved a bottoming Rebound, but also achieved an 8.4% pump in just two days, hitting a nearly three-week high of $66,750 at one point.

Despite the boost in market sentiment, traders remained cautious and did not rush to forecast the pump. At the same time, venture capital activity in the Crypto Assets space is also active, industry cooperation and innovation are emerging, and legal regulation of Crypto Assets has also become the focus of market participants.

In this context, the cautious attitude of market participants contrasts sharply with the innovative development of the industry, which together shape the future direction of the digital money market. Next, this article will bring you a summary of the latest news trends in the crypto world on May 17.

| Market Moves

The Bitcoin market has seen a significant recovery after a recent period of Fluctuation. In particular, in just two days on May 15-16, Bitcoin price achieved a strong rebound of 8.4%, reaching a nearly three-week high of $66,750. This pump not only brought a positive sentiment boost to the market, but also rekindled investors' optimistic expectations.

However, market traders were not fooled by this short-term pump and showed a high degree of professionalism and prudence. Faced with the recovery in Bitcoin prices, traders did not rush to add longer positions, but adopted a more cautious strategy. This attitude stems from their deep insight into the current macroeconomic environment and their awareness of the inherent Fluctuation of Crypto Assets markets. In the context of a complex and longest global economy, the Crypto Assets market is also facing uncertainties, including factors such as monetary policy, geopolitical risks, and liquidity in financial markets, which may have an impact on the price of Bitcoin.

Traders are paying close attention to market dynamics, including technical analysis indicators, market volume, and macroeconomic data, in hopes of capturing more accurate market signals. By taking these factors into account, they seek to make more rational and calculated investment decisions. In addition, traders are also paying attention to long-term trends in the Crypto Assets market, including the development of Blockchain technology, changes in regulatory policies, and the expansion of industry applications, which may have an impact on the long-term value of Bitcoin.

| Encryption Campaign

In the new boom of the Crypto Assets market, venture capital activity has shown significant activity. Aquarius, a well-known venture capital firm in the Crypto Assets space, announced a major fundraising event with the successful launch of a $600 million longest strategy liquidity fund. The fund was established to support Blockchain projects and ecosystems, and in particular to play a key role in enhancing on-chain Liquidity.

At the same time, Bitcoin ETFs attracted 937 professional investment firms in the first quarter of 2023, which is far more than the 95 investment firms of gold ETFs in the same period, indicating a significant increase in institutional investor interest in Bitcoin ETFs. Professional investments in Bitcoin ETFs amounted to more than $11 billion, accounting for 18.7% of total assets under management. In addition, large financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and Wells Fargo also participated, further highlighting the market attractiveness of Bitcoin ETFs.

ETFs are likely to continue to be favored by investors as U.S. inflation data stabilizes. The competition between Grayscale's GBTC and BlackRock's IBIT, as well as the participation of companies such as Fidelity, bodes well for further developments in the Bitcoin ETF market.

These developments suggest that despite the Fluctuation and uncertainty in the market, the Crypto Assets market is still attracting the attention of large amounts of capital and professional investors, and points to more long rise and expansion opportunities in the sector in the future.

| Industry News

Within the digital money industry, a series of collaborations and innovative projects are driving the market forward. The American Depositary Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC)'s partnership with Chainlink is particularly noteworthy, as they have successfully implemented a pilot program for financial fund tokenization with longest leading banks. Protocol to Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), this initiative aims to standardize and make available fund net asset value (NAV) data across Blockchain, marking a significant step forward in the way financial data is disseminated and utilized.

Meanwhile, Bitwise's chief investment officer, Matt Hougan, expressed optimistic expectations about Bitcoin ETF Holdings. According to the newly released 13F document, Spot Bitcoin ETF has attracted the Holdings of more than 900 professional investment firms, which far exceeds the previous estimate of 700 companies, Assets Under Management close to $5 billion, showing the high recognition and participation of the professional investment community for Bitcoin ETF.

In addition, Tether's partnership with mobile payment app Oobit is also an important industry development. Through this cooperation, the transaction process of USDT and Tether Gold (XAUt) on the open network (TON) has been simplified, providing users with a more convenient trading experience. Users can now send USDT directly via Telegram, a move that greatly improves the convenience and usability of Digital Money in everyday transactions.

These collaborations and innovative initiatives not only strengthen the infrastructure of digital money, but also lay a solid foundation for the further development and maturity of the industry. With the increasing long collaboration between industry players, it is expected that more long innovative products and services will emerge in the future to meet the needs of the market and users.

| Legal Focus

At the legal and regulatory level, the Crypto Assets industry has seen some noteworthy developments recently. The first is NotWifGary (NWG), an emerging Decentralization memecoin that was announced on May 17 and has made clear its opposition to the American SEC (SEC). The birth of the NWG reflects the encryption community's concerns about over-regulation and its desire to protect DeFi innovations.

In addition, the U.S. Senate voted 60-38 to pass a resolution, HJRes.109, which seeks to repeal the SEC's Employee Accounting Bulletin No. 121. This announcement requires financial institutions to record customers' digital assets on their balance sheets and reserve corresponding capital for this purpose. This regulation has been widely criticized as over-regulated and could hinder fintech innovation and development. The Senate's decision is seen as a support for the Crypto Assets industry, showing that the legislature is listening to the industry and is willing to adjust regulatory measures that could dampen innovation.

These legal highlights highlight not only the tensions between the Crypto Assets space and regulators, but also the complexities of finding a balance between protecting investors and promoting innovation. As Crypto Assets grow in popularity and maturity, adaptation and updating of legal and regulatory frameworks will be key to ensuring the healthy and orderly development of this industry.

Conclusion:

In the longest landscape of the digital money market, investors' caution contrasts sharply with innovation in the industry. Bitcoin price Rebound has boosted sentiment, but traders' cautious attitude suggests that they still have reservations about the long-term direction of the market. At the same time, innovative collaborations within the industry, such as Aquarius' Liquidity Fund, the entry of 937 specialist investment firms into the Bitcoin ETF, and DTCC's tokenization pilot with Chainlink, are driving the industry forward.

At the same time, the digital money market is expected to continue to evolve under the dual influence of technological innovation and legal regulation. The legislature's decision to repeal SEC regulations could provide more long short for fintech innovation.

It is believed that with the strengthening of industry cooperation and the maturity of technology, the Digital Money market has the potential to achieve wider application and higher efficiency. While uncertainties remain, the market's adaptability and ability to innovate keeps people optimistic about its long-term prospects.

Originally written by Karen, Foresight News

On May 17th, the Linea Surge event officially kicked off. Linea has launched the first phase of the Linea Surge Points Program (Volt 1), which aims to drive a thriving ecosystem by attracting more long users and increasing TVL on the network, which promises to open a new chapter in Linea's rise flywheel.

Despite the PUA controversy and complaints among some community users, Linea has previously made it clear that Linea Surge is the final piece of the puzzle before embarking on its journey to decentralization to create a truly community-owned and operated network.

As part of the program, Linea will award LXP-L points to participating users who hold assets on Linea and deploy them on Decentralized Finance protocol. Linea Surge will run for 6 months (6 Phase Volts), or until its TVL reaches $3 billion. As the campaign progresses, the distribution of LXP-L in each phase will be reduced by 10%, which means that the earlier you participate, the more long the rewards. According to Linea, users can earn LXP-L points per hour by simply cross-chain assets to Linea, keep them in on-chain state, and deploy them to designated protocol.

For users with more than 0.1 ETH of existing liquidity until the last block on May 16 at 07:59, they will receive Volt 1's LXP-L early adopter multiplier as an additional reward. In addition, Liquidity deployed in a single protocol must be greater than or equal to $24 in the Linea Surge campaign for credits to be counted. It is worth mentioning that Linea said that there is no need to check witches for this event, and users will receive the same number of points regardless of whether they concentrate all their liquidity into one wallet or disperse it across K Address.

There are three main ways to obtain LXP-L points, namely ecosystem points, referral points, and veteran points. Among them, ecosystem points are mainly used to incentivize users to cross-chain or deposit assets into Linea and interact protocols across various ecological protocols; Referral points are distributed through Linea Surge's referral mechanism, while Veteran points are long wick candle additional rewards for users with significant historical activity and contributions on the Linea platform.

The chart below illustrates the weighting of ecosystem points, with long wick candle having the highest weighting for Liquidity points for ETH and LRT on DEXs and lending platforms, as well as rewards for ETH cross-chain activities, long wick candle less weight for stablecoin, LST, and RWA.

Which Tokens Are Allowlisted by Linea Surge?

The Linea Surge campaign has Allowlisted the following Tokens:

• ETH、wETH、WBTC、nextwETH、mBTC、SolvBTC；
• LRT/LST：weETH、wrsETH、uniETH、ezETH、inETH、ankrETH、wstETH、mpETH、STONE、frxETH；
• RWA：sUSDE、wDAI、EURO 3、LUSDC、agEUR、USD+、USDT+；
• Stablecoins: USDC, USDT, DAI, alxUSDC, nextUSDC, nextUSDT, nextDAl, USDE, GRAI, Added, LYU.

21 protocols participate in the Linea Surge event

Teahouse Finance: Longing Decentralized Finance asset flexible management platform, focusing on centralized liquidity provision on Uniswap V3;

PancakeSwap: a longest DEX protocol;

Secta: Linea's ecological DEX and Launchpad, there is no issuance of platform tokens and no launch of Launchpad, but Secta's first Launchpad will issuance its own platform Token SECTA. The main use case for the Secta Token is to secure distribution in the projects it incubates and launches.

Token economic model: 57% to the community, 5% to the public sale, 15% to investors (6 months fully locked, 24 months linear release), 3% to advisors (12 months fully locked, then 24 months linear release), 20% to teams (12 months fully locked, then 24 months linear release).

Mendi Finance: A lending protocol in the Linea ecosystem, which has introduced the Mendi Loyalty Points (MLP) program, which is a soul-bound ERC-20 Token that will be distributed proportionally to users who borrow and borrow protocol and stake protocol. Mendi Finance said that if there is a potential airdrop given to Mendi in the future, MLP will be used as the accounting system for the distribution to distribute the airdrop fairly to holders. To gain liquidity, Mendi Finance will bribe Lynex weekly, and the earned oLYNX will be distributed to MENDI stakes. Mendi Finance was issuance Token at the end of last year, and the Token economy and distribution model can be found here.

Connext:Layer 2 Interoperability protocol;

Overnight: Asset management protocol that provides conservative stablecoin investors with passive income products based on Delta-neutral strategies.

Sushi: longest DEX protocol;

Lynex: Linea's ecological Liquidity Engine, aggregates automated Liquidity Manager (ALM). Each transaction on Lynex generates a transaction Token fee, which is used to reward active voters and strengthen the Lynex treasury. Lynex has been issuance Token.

SyncSwap: zkSync Era, Linea, and Scroll ecosystem DEX protocol, not issuance Token.

Deri Protocol: Decentralization derivation protocol, issuance Token.

Velocore: The zkSync Era and Linea ecosystem have been issuance Token based on Velodrome's veDEX protocol.

SpartaDEX: The gamification DEX of the Arbitrum One and Linea ecosystems has been issuance Token.

iZUMi Swap: long chain Decentralized Finance protocol, providing a one-stop Liquidity-as-a-service (LaaS), has been issuance Token.

Stargate: cross-chain bridges, issuance Token.

Celer Network: cross-chain bridges, issuance Token.

NILE: DEX protocol, issuance Token.

Gravita Protocol: A ETH-centric long-chain LST lending protocol that has not yet launched protocol governance token.

Lyve Finance: Linea's ecological stablecoin project, which supports the use of ETH or LST minting stablecoin LYU, and can also revolve and borrow, has been issuance governance token.

ZeroLend: Decentralization lending protocol on zkSync, Manta Network, Blast, and Linea, issuance Token.

Renzo: stake protocol again, it's issuance Token.

Clip Finance: An automated yield solution that unlocks CLIP Tokens for the first time when TVL reaches $1 million, and a points system will be released soon. CLIP Token holders can enhance their Liquidity Mining through stake Token and also have governance rights, which can be tokenomics here.

How to participate in Linea Surge efficiently long a fish?

So how do you earn the most long LXP and ambush potential Airdrop in the most capital-efficient way? Some of the paths include:

Path 1: Use cross-chain bridges to ETH cross-chain to Linea, deposit LRT or LST Token in the stake protocol stake ETH and borrow protocol, for example, provide wrsETH (Kelp DAO issuance LRT Token on ZeroLend, you can earn twice Kelp Miles, Linea LXP-L points, 5% Turtle (virtual Liquidity protocol) LXP-L points and TurtleDAO points from Turtle Club; Or borrow stablecoin GRAI (Gravita Protocol's issuance over-collateralization debt Token with ether.fi weETH at Gravita Protocol, and then provide Liquidity at NILE to earn the most LXP in the most capital-efficient way.

Path 2: ETH cross-chain to Linea with cross-chain bridges, deposit Liquidity and LP Token in DEX protocol, such as Connex cross-chain ETH, Velocore with Liquidity and stake LP Token to earn LXP-L points, pre-mine reward LVC from Velocore, and Carrot points from Router Nitro.

Attitudes towards Crypto Assets have become an important issue in the US election this November. Interestingly, users are not only seeing traditional pollsters continue to provide data, but also Polymarket, a prediction market platform based on Crypto Assets, gaining popularity. As of May 16, nearly $127 million has been bet on the topic of "winner of the 2024 presidential race", of which $15 million is betting on Trump, who has a 50% chance of winning, $14.55 million is betting on Biden, which has a 42% chance of winning, and none of the other three candidates has a win rate of no more than 3%.

Just a few days ago, on May 14, Polymarket announced that it had raised $70 million through two funding rounds, the most recent of which was led by Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund, and Polymarket's investors also included Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Polymarket was launched in May 2020 in response to the widespread spread of misinformation during the pandemic, and the platform went live in mid-June of that year. Also in time for the 2020 and 2024 U.S. elections, the interweaving of major events has gradually brought this Crypto Assets-based prediction market platform into people's eyes and market hotspots.

NYU dropped out of the Department of Computer Science to start a business and admired Hayek

Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan, 26, once studied computer science at New York University, according to his LinkedIn page. According to public reports, in many longer ways, Coplan has the temperament of a new generation of entrepreneurs. He is an artist who is fascinated by P2P file sharing in an era when people love to share music. Since then, he has been exposed to Bitcoin and has easily understood the Intrinsic Value of a global peer-to-peer asset network.

When Ethereum was announced in 2014, Coplan became an early follower and is believed to be the youngest of the presale participants. Two years later, at the age of 18, Coplan began working on Blockchain projects, and in June 2016, he interned at Chronicled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where his role was to "follow the Chief Product Officer and help decide how the product interacts with the Ethereum Blockchain." ”

Since then, Coplan has also been obsessed with Crypto Assets, launching a series of startups and founding a Decentralized Finance startup called Union.market, which is directly the predecessor of Polymarket. Although he later dropped out of school, he has been thinking for a long time about some of the specific problems faced by the creation of prediction markets and decentralization markets over the past few years. He called Hayek's famous essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" an early entrepreneurial inspiration, and Coplan also drew on longest years of academic research on prediction markets. Hayek's related idea is that people are more likely to accurately understand the likelihood of uncertainty when economic incentives are at work. People read longer and better sources of information, think deeper, and try to invest their money in actual outcomes that are more likely to happen.

"When COVID broke out, there was so long uncertainty and so long different perspectives, [I think] if there was only a free market on those topics, people could tie money to their opinions," Coplan once told the media.

On June 16, 2020, the beta version of encryption prediction market Polymarket was released, but at the time there was high friction for users, with only Metamask login support, high Ethereum Money Laundering, and limited Liquidity. Three months later, with the release of the second phase of Polymarket, Coplan's approach to building Polymarket became clearer. The platform was ported to Ethereum's second layer, Matic (now Polygon), to drop gas fees for betting. He also designed the system for users who did not have Ethereum Wallet. All bets are placed in USD-pegged stablecoin USDC and can be purchased via debit or credit card.

Just a few months after its initial launch, Polymarket managed to attract attention with a massive $4 million seed round led by prominent investors Polychain Capital and Naval Ravikant.

The 2020 U.S. election became a catalyst for Polymarket. On November 3 of that year, affected by the U.S. election, Polymarket's volume soared to $1.297 million, from unknown to up-and-coming.

Polymarket's volume and monthly active population since its launch in 2020 With longer positive feedback from the community and market recognition, Polymarket later attracted Series A funding, where General Catalyst helped the company raise $25 million in Series A funding, with participation from Airbnb's Joe Gebbia and Polychain, among others.

Most recently, Polymarket's Series B funding reached $45 million, led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and existing investors 1confirmation and ParaFi, with participation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Dragonfly and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz.

Fined $1.4 million by the CFTC, the submarine prediction sparked controversy

Polymarket's development has not been without its challenges. In January 2022, Polymarket was fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for violating regulations and received cease and desist orders, including for failing to register as a trading intermediary facility. Protocol to the settlement, Polymarket committed to reducing its service in the U.S. and continuing to operate overseas.

However, Polymarket has also stepped up its compliance efforts. In May 2022, Polymarket appointed former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission member J. J. Christopher Giancarlo is Chairman of its Advisory Board.

In addition to this fine, in June 2023, according to Mother Jones, a tweet about the results of the Titan submersible went viral, causing quite a few negative consequences for Polymarket. There's a bet on Polymarket on whether the submersible will be found by a certain date, with users betting more than $300,000 on whether the missing submarine will be found "by June 23." This has sparked online discussion about the ethics of profiting from potentially fatal events.

"What stage of capitalism does betting on someone else's death belong to," one Twitter user asked, posting a screenshot showing the odds on Polymarket. The sentiment touched a nerve, and the post quickly went viral, garnering over 9,000 retweets and over 150,000 likes. "It's insane. Imagine making money by whether someone dies or not," replied another user, which was liked more than 1,000 times. Others began to directly criticize the prediction that Polymarket would open up.

The developing Polymarket responded to ethical concerns, describing the submarine market as "irrelevant to any outcomes for passengers." "We understand that there has been some confusion due to the misunderstanding that our prediction market is related to the fate of passengers. We want to emphasize that this is not true," Polymarket wrote. "Our goal is not to profit from this unfortunate event. We didn't do that either. It's about helping people better understand the world around them. ”

"Break through" in the encryption prediction market track, when will it mature?

prediction market itself has a long history, but in the encryption space, the first Decentralization prediction market was Augur, which was launched at the Ethereum in July 2018. Augur was developed by the Forecast Foundation, which was founded in 2014 by Jack Peterson, Joey Krug, and Jeremy Gardner. The Forecast Foundation is advised by Ron Bernstein, founder of defunct company Intrade, and Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum.

In addition to Augur, Polymarket is not the only prediction market in the market, but also Gnosis, Hedgehog, PlotX, Projection Finance, Sanr.app, Better.fan, Feel.market, etc. However, Gnosis turned to community management projects after failing to meet expectations. Other encryption prediction market, such as Veil, were simply shut down.

Early Crypto Assets-based prediction market experiments, such as Augur and Gnosis, have also been hit hard by Ethereum's long-standing scaling problem. In addition, they all initially used native tokens, adding friction to the user experience. Polymarket has learned from the mistakes of its predecessors.

After 4 years of development, Polymarke has now successfully "broken through", and will even be cited by media reports and industry research on some key issues as a reference for public opinion.

As of May 14, there are longing hot topics on Polymarket's website: Who will win the 2024 presidential election? Will the May 31 Ethereum ETF be passed? Will $GME reach all-time highs by Friday?

According to Token Terminal, Polymarket's highest volume so far this year came on January 10 at $5.73 million. The platform experienced a significant rise in the number of monthly active users in January, rise from 1,600 on January 1 to 4,100 on February 1, with a slowdown in monthly active users after April. As of May 15, the forecast on Polymarket has reached $202.7 million.

Following the recent funding round, Coplan said on LinkedIn that "the most gratifying thing is to see Polymarket being widely adopted as an alternative news source." The trend is clear: thanks to Polymarket, people are more aware of what is happening in the world. Fed up with the rhetoric of experts and Algorithm-generated news. In this age of rampant misinformation, Polymarket offers a new form of information driven by financial incentives to drive truth, rather than luring to get clicks. People want unbiased information. Polymarket is providing this. ”

As a firm believer in market theory, Coplan believes that forecasting platforms are a true way to better understand reality.

Polymarket has already attracted the attention of many long industry insiders. Vitalik used Polymarket to track Sam Altman's board out. Packy McCormick, an advisor at a16z Crypto, has also said that Polymarket's page is probably the best place on the internet to start the day.

Riding on the social hotspots, with the support of celebrity users, Polymarket has become the biggest encryption prediction market, however, to achieve its original intention, continuous optimization of the product experience and avoiding risks and ethical dilemmas is a crucial challenge for future development.

Original | Odaily

Author | Husband How

In the early morning of May 17, community members posted on social media that the Solana eco-meme launch platform pump.fun suspected of having $80 million worth of SOL Token and a large number of meme coin stolen. Subsequently, the attacker "STACCoverflow" blew himself up on platform X and Airdrop dozens to hundreds of SOL Token to the owners of meme Token on the Solana, threatening that these Airdrop would cause Solana to fork because of this.

According to several tweets from the attacker "STACCoverflow", the attacker's mental state is suspected to have been hit by the death of a family member and made a retaliatory attack. However, some community members reported that the attacker was suspected of being an internal employee of pump.fun and used the Private Key leak to attack pump.fun.

Is it the internal employees who insist on self-theft, or the "injured" Hacker who carries out the global airdrop? Odaily takes a holistic look at the theft of pump.fun and analyzes its impact on pump.fun and Solana.

pump.fun When attacked, the fastest reaction is Wallet

On the evening of May 17, some Solana users found themselves long dozens to hundreds of SOL Token in their Wallet. Later, community members found out that the suspected Hacker was attacking pump.fun, and Hacker was also posting on platform X. As can be seen from the content, the attacker was very emotional and the content of the tweet was rather confusing.

After learning that the attackers were going to Airdrop the stolen funds, some community members also replied to their tweets with Wallet Address words of encouragement. Especially after learning that the attacker was suspected of falling into madness because of the death of his mother, he was collectively mourning the attacker's mother and attaching the Address.

Quite a few SOL Token users who have already been Airdrop by the attackers have posted thanksgiving and praising the attackers' actions. In addition, some people have launched the meme coin BunkerFuts. According to Birdeye data, the BunkerFuts Token has pumped nearly 19 times at most.

Lgor Lamberdiev, head of research at Wintermute, posted that pump.fun was Private Key compromised because the service account Address 5PXxuZ somehow signed txs to transfer funds to attackers and random Address instead of deploying the Raydium pool, a move that proved highly likely to be a pump.fun compromise Private Key led to the attack.

How do attackers steal pump.fun funds? Attackers exploit the marginfi lending platform to flash loan attack pump.fun and fill up all pools on pump.fun that have been created but not filled to the point where they can be used on Raydium. At this time, the SOL Token in the pool were transferred to the Private Key leaked Address because they met the criteria of Raydium, and the attacker siphoned off the transferred SOL Token in time.

Is it true that the attacker stole $80 million worth of tokens?

As a victim of this attack, pump.fun finally spoke out and revealed that the attacker was a former employee of the company, and used his privileges in the company to illegally obtain withdrawal permissions, and carried out flash loan attack with the help of a lending protocol, ** stealing about 12,300 SOL (worth about $1.9 million). **

Subsequently, pump.fun official posted that the contract had been upgraded, and the attackers could no longer steal any funds, and suspended the transaction, and it is currently unable to buy or sell any Token. Any Token currently being migrated to Raydium cannot be traded and will not be migrated for some time to come. Any Token that has been successfully transferred out of pump.fun's contract and locked Liquidity on Raydium is safe. If a user has ever connected a Wallet to a pump.fun, the user's Wallet is secure.

It is worth mentioning that when an attack occurs, the fastest response is not pump.fun official website, but related projects such as Wallet, and Phantom Wallet and Bonkbot suspend their association with pump.fun as soon as possible.

pump.fun Trust has fallen to freezing point, and it may gradually die out in the future

Looking back at the entire pump.fun theft, there are a few particularly interesting phenomena.

The first is the praise and pursuit of the melon-eating masses for the Hacker's behavior of "random money", and the first reaction of many people when they see the news is to see if the wallet has SOL transferred, and there is a sense of "opening the mystery box". Of course, it may also have something to do with the fact that you are not pump.fun users, after all, it is none of your business.

Another question worth pondering is why pump.fun former employees still hold company privileges after they leave the company, which ultimately leads to the attack. One possible reason for this is pump.fun opacity of its own mechanism leads to the existence of "backdoors" that can be exploited. With this attack, the user's trust in pump.fun has also dropped to a freezing point. If effective solutions are not taken in the future, pump.fun may gradually fade out of the public eye and gradually disappear.

Finally, the impact on Solana, the author believes that as long as it does not involve the defects of the public chain's own mechanism, it is only the risk caused by the project's own problems, which has almost no impact on the development of Solana.

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: SHLOK KHEMANI

Compilation: LlamaC

"Testimonial: Sanctum has brought breakthrough changes to the Solana ecosystem, making staking more flexible and accessible. Its innovation not only improves the capital efficiency of LST, but also provides small validators with the opportunity to compete with larger projects, further promoting Solana's openness and inclusion. As more long individuals and projects begin to issuance custom LST, we'll see their community-driven, innovative energy. This article is designed to help you understand the Sanctum protocol, explore how it is redefining liquid staking, and think about how this innovation has brought new perspectives and opportunities to our Decentralized Finance journey. Pump knowledge together! enjoy！」

Body 👇

Tl; DR: liquid staking is one of the core security and Decentralized Finance primitives of any attestation (Proof-of-Stake, PoS) Blockchain. In this article, we compare the liquid staking landscape on Ethereum and Solana. One has a strong ecosystem, while the other is in a more nascent stage and is evolving in a different way.

We explain the different approaches taken by the two. Finally, we tear down Sanctum, a novel protocol that rethinks liquid staking on Solana.

Transaction networks require a high level of security to earn trust. If someone were able to change a SWIFT wire instruction or a Visa transaction, people would lose trustless in those systems. The same goes for Blockchain. Security determines how receptive users are to them. For example, there is the highest hashrate support behind the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Therefore, we have a basic understanding that once a transaction is recorded in the network, malicious actors cannot manipulate it. But the cost of trading on Bitcoin is very high.

In recent years, low-cost networks like Solana and Ethereum have transitioned to attestation (PoS) Consensus Mechanism. Unlike Bitcoin, which relies on computing power, these networks use stake capital to measure economic security.

Before we dive into how this works, here's a quick overview of some of the terms you might see in this article:

Validators: Users who protect the PoS chain.

Staking: Validators gain the right to create blocks, process transactions, and secure the network by locking a certain amount of the network's native coins as collateral. This Collateral is called their "equity". Some networks, such as Ethereum, stipulate a minimum stake amount, while others, such as Solana, do not.

Leader: The network chooses a validators, called a leader, to create the next Block. The probability of being chosen as a leader is directly proportional to the size of their stake and other network-specific factors. Once a leader creates a block, other validators in the network verify the validity of their transactions.

If the network accepts the block, the leader receives the block reward for the issuance of the network and the transaction fee paid by the user.

Slashing: If other validators deem a block invalid, the leader may lose a portion of the Token as a penalty in a process known as slashing. Validators often have significant economic exposure to the networks they help secure. As a result, they have little incentive to pass flawed data to the network. If they do, they will lose Token by slashing.

When a PoS Blockchain works as intended, the rewards earned by honest validators accumulate to form a steady return to the stake Token, usually expressed in APR (APY). On Ethereum, this yield is usually between 2-4%.

These returns from staking have three functions. First, they protect the network. Second, they incentivize long-term engagement within the ecosystem. Third, they help ensure that long-term participants are not diluted by Inflation.

If you think of the network as a city, staking is like building a house in that city. It keeps you there for a long time and appreciates in value over time.

Current dilemma

Staking has its advantages, but they are not cheap. Just like building a house in the real world, people may not have the time, energy, capital, and skills to set up a validators Node. Everyone wants yield, but expecting to run a validator for yield may not be feasible. This is where delegated staking comes in.

The concept is simple: users entrust their stake to a validators and then validators return the earned rewards to the user after deducting a percentage of the proceeds as a fee.

While delegating staking solves one problem for users, it also creates another.

When a user holds the chain's native coin, it is liquid. They can sell it at any time, or deploy it into Decentralized Finance protocol for additional income such as borrowing and liquidity pool. However, once the Token is natively staked, it becomes illiquid. Stakes must wait for the bonding period, after the cooling-off period has passed, before they can withdraw their stakes.

On some PoS on-chains, this can be up to 21 days. They also gave up the opportunity to earn extra yield when their tokens were staked. I guess you can't both hold your stake and eat (gains) in this game.

liquid staking is a solution that allows users to protocol stake their Token through a protocol minting that represents the liquid staking Token (LST) of the stake assets. These LSTs can be freely traded on exchanges and used in Decentralized Finance applications to provide users with liquidity. When a user wants to take it back, they can offer their LST to the stake protocol in exchange for this coin, and then protocol will destroy the LST.

If too long users are in a hurry to withdraw their liquid staking assets by trading on the exchange, it can lead to depeg. This was the case with Lido's Token last year, where the price of its liquid staking Token is lower than the price at which it can be redeemed – a kind of bank bank run.

Staking plays a central role in securing PoS Blockchains, and liquid staking has become one of the most important areas in the encryption space due to its fundamental utility of unlocking illiquid capital.

TVL in cross-chain liquid staking protocol account for more than 50% of all Decentralized Finance protocol TVLs. In that ecosystem, Lido holds about $28 billion in staked assets. But what does Lido do?

Becoming a validator on Ethereum requires at least 32 ETH (approximately $100,000 as of May 7, 2024) of staking, technical know-how, and comes with the risk of slashing. This makes solo staking (running your own validators) an unappealing option for a large longest number of users.

Ethereum does not support native stake delegation. This means that you can't directly stake your ETH with validators, but instead need an out-of-protocol service to facilitate delegation. Those with capital but lack the knowledge or intent can delegate node operations to stake-as-a-service offerings like P2P or stakefish, which charge a monthly service fee.

The dominance of the Lido has grown over time.

Those who don't have 32 ETH capital rely on platforms like Lido. Users can deposit ETH into Lido's staking pool in exchange for liquid staking Token stETH. The deposit pool is evenly distributed among 39 trusted and vetted Node operators. Lido charges a 10% fee on stake rewards, which is split equally between the Node Operator and the Lido DAO treasury.

Here are some numbers to help you understand Lido's scale:

• 27% of all ETH is staked. Of the ETH staked, nearly 30% is deposited into Lido.
• Lido's TVL is about $28.7 billion, more than 7 times that of on-chain's second-largest stake protocol ($3.71 billion for RocketPool).
• Lido accounts for more than half of Ethereum's total TVL and nearly one-third of all on-chain total Decentralized Finance TVL.

These numbers raise two questions.

• First of all, How did Lido become so dominant?
• Second, is this dominance healthy for Decentralization networks like Ethereum?

The answer to the first question lies in the interplay between Liquidity and Distribution.

The biggest value proposition of LST is instant liquidity. Users should be able to sell Tokens at the lowest possible Slippage (best price) at any time. Slippage is a function of the size of the Liquidity pair of LST with other assets (ETH, stablecoin) on the exchange.

The larger these pairs and the lower the slippage, the wider the adoption of LST.

Lido's stETH has the highest liquidity in LST. One can buy more than $7 million worth of stETH for less than 2% of the price impact (±2% Depth figure shown here) on ask price long exchange. For the second largest LST rETH, the same metric is less than $600,000.

The high Liquidity also helps to integrate into the lending protocol. Users often stake assets as collateral for loans. It has two functions. First, they can earn on the underlying asset. Second, it provides them with USD liquidity for their stake assets. These dollars can then be used for trading or increasing leverage by buying longer underlying assets (ETH or SOL) to stake and increase yield.

But when a user's long wick candle loan to an asset is liquidated, protocol need immediate Liquidity to prevent the Collateral from going bad (becoming undercollateralized). If the Liquidity of a LST is low, the likelihood of borrowing protocol accepting it as a Collateral will be drop. stETH is currently the largest lending asset on Ethereum protocol the most long supply on Aave.

The other half of the interaction is distribution. Users hold LST to earn additional yield or participate in the broader Decentralized Finance space. Therefore, the more long a protocol a LST can use, the more attractive it is to hold. Think of coins around the world. The more a regional coin is accepted, the greater its value.

Lido's LST (stETH) is like USD for stake assets. No LST in the Ethereum ecosystem is as widely accepted as Lido's stETH.

One can use stETH on the Synthetix perpetual marketplace on Optimism, on the Venus coin marketplace in BNB on-chain, or on Aave on Arbitrum. EtherFi, a stake protocol that owns about 4% of all stake ETH, only accepts ETH and stETH deposits. Similarly, even a new protocol like Morpheus, a peer-to-peer AI network, only accepts stETH deposits.

Liquidity and distribution reinforce each other. The higher the liquidity of LST, the more attractive it is to users. The long the number of users holding LST, the greater the incentive protocol integrate it. This, in turn, has led to wider adoption, with more long users depositing funds into Lido, generating higher Liquidity.

These compound network effects result in a centralized winner-takes-all market structure. Lido is a behemoth because it occupies this market on the Ethereum, which is the most long chain for Decentralized Finance activity.

Lido's network effect provides it with a huge moat. It's not easy to tear it apart (just ask the hundreds of Social Web upstarts who are trying to compete with Twitter or Instagram). New entrants need to have both deep pockets (to draw attention) and a unique value proposition if they want to compete with the behemoth of Lido.

But does this mean that Lido's dominance poses a threat to Ethereum's decentralization nature? Some, like the author of this article, think it is. As a Lido DAO that controls about 30% of the stake Ethereum, it may have too much influence on the network.

Given that Lido currently has only 39 node operators, there is a risk that operators will collude to carry out activities that are harmful to the health of the network. They can theoretically do transaction review and cross-block MEV extraction. If Lido continues to rise and takes up half of all stake ETH, they can start reviewing the entire Block. At two-thirds of the stake ETH, they will be able to finalize all Block.

LDO holders benefit from the 5% of the stake rewards retained by the DAO. Therefore, their motivation is to maximize the amount of stake held by Lido and the fees generated by their operators. Any decisions they make will serve that goal and not for the benefit of the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

This presents a basic principle - the problem of proxy. Lido is making changes to mitigate these risks.

1. First, they are working to increase operators, make them more geographically dispersed, and eventually allow any validator to join without permission. Second, there is a proposal to introduce dual governance into the protocol. Both stETH and Lido holders will have a say in the direction of the project.

However, despite these changes, Lido itself is tending to form a monopoly on Ethereum stake. This brings with it the long-term risks that we discussed.

Solana

The staking and LST landscape on Solana is very different from Ethereum. Solana's stake ratio (the percentage of SOL stake in circulation) is over 70%, much higher than Ethereum's 27%. However, LST only accounts for 6% of the stake supply (compared to more than 40% on Ethereum).

It's valuable to explore the reasons behind this difference.

• First and foremost, staking on Solana works very differently than Ethereum. Unlike Ethereum, Solana supports delegated attestation. This means that users can stake any number of SOL, with no minimum requirements, directly with validators stake, without the need to use third-party protocol. In fact, large long Wallet (including popular Wallet like Phantom and Backpack) allow direct stake through Wallet interfaces.

This makes it easy for users to stake their SOL locally. In contrast, due to Ethereum's lack of delegated stake, using a staking pool like Lido is the only viable option for large long stake.

• Second, the cuts on Solana have not been activated. This means that the choice of validators is not a critical issue and one can validators stake with any one that offers returns without taking risks. However, on Ethereum, slashing is active, which makes it important for validators to choose a staking pool solution like Lido for execution.

This also means that the return of staking a staking pool that is distributed to longest validators on Solana is not significantly different from the return of staking directly with one of the top validators.

• Third, the Decentralized Finance ecosystem on Solana is not as mature as it is on Ethereum. This means that even if users stake their SOL for LST, there is no longest protocol to take advantage of. Why take extra risks, such as smart contracts being hacked, when there aren't longing opportunities to make a profit? Instead, choose the simple route to stake directly.

The first generation of Solana LST – Marinade's mSOL, Lido's stSOL, or SolBlaze's bSOL – mimicked the strategy of liquid staking protocol on Ethereum. The problem is that the problems that Lido and its peers solve on Ethereum simply don't exist on Solana.

The best illustration of this is Lido's community vote after leaving Solana in 2023. The main reason is that the revenue generated is lower than the expenses (this is partly due to the fact that Solana is still in the post-FTX downturn). But I think another equally important reason is that Lido and Solana don't match culturally.

Going back to our discussion of Lido's dominance on Ethereum, one reason is that stETH is integrated into all major Decentralized Finance protocol and projects in the ecosystem. This does not happen automatically, but requires longest years of groundwork and building trust and goodwill within the ecosystem. Players within the Web3 industry will refer to these as business development (BD) efforts.

These networks cannot be easily replicated in new on-chain just because a protocol has been successful on-chain competition, especially given the tribal nature of Crypto Assets.

It is often assumed that technical standards are adopted purely on the basis of their efficiency. But the adoption at the bottom is often personal. This is clearly demonstrated by Marinade's dominance on the Solana stake, surpassing Lido.

In the first few months of Solana stake, there were two major players: Lido, a encryption unicorn backed by millions of venture capital, and Marinade, a self-funded project born out of Solana hackathon. However, Lido's stSOL has never surpassed Marinade's mSOL on TVL.

This is partly because Marinade's sole focus (and birthplace) is Solana. In contrast, Lido expands from its own network to another location.

Recently, with the revival of Solana, LST is making a comeback, spearheaded by Jito, the protocol we wrote about earlier.

Jito becomes the Solana native protocol as much as possible. Their 2023 Airdrop awakened Solana from its post-FTX slumber, creating a wealth effect and a resurgence of on-chain activity. With venture capital and the kind support of the community, Jito is following Lido's playbook and seeking to dominate LST on Solana.

1. Jito started using its governance token JTO to motivate JitoSOL Liquidity Liquidity on exchange. They have the highest APY, TVL, and volume of all LSTs on the Kamino Liquidity Bank.
2. Second, Jito is working with other top protocol on Solana such as Solend, Drift, Jupiter, and marginfi to deeply integrate JitoSOL into the ecosystem.
3. Third, it is expanding to Arbitrum by partnering with Wormhole, thereby enabling longest chaining and increasing the utility and attractiveness of JitoSOL.

Jito has the longest liquidity of any LST on Kanami

With Solana back in the game, JitoSOL's activities and Liquidity proliferated, and Jito perfectly scheduled the release and rise of JitoSOL. Not only did it become the dominant LST on the Solana, but it was also the protocol of the highest TVL in the on-chain.

By following Lido's playbook, there are early indications that Jito may also be copying Lido's results – completely dominant. If the current trajectory continues, it could be a very favorable outcome for Jito. However, given the debate surrounding Lido's impact on Ethereum's health, is Jito in a similar position, especially since they also have the most popular MEV solution on the on-chain, would it be beneficial for Solana? Maybe not.

Jito's ball is rolling, and given the complex nature of network effects, it's hard to stop once it's big enough. However, due to the debate over the final state of LST, which is still relatively early, a new force has emerged that could prevent Solana from reaching the same LST endpoint as Ethereum.

Dismantling Sanctum

The Sanctum team is the OG of the Solana liquid staking ecosystem. They first helped Solana create the first stake pool contract, which is now used by almost all LSTs (except mSOL). Before creating unstake.it (now Sanctum Reserve), they also ran a traditional stake pool called scnSOL.

Sanctum is fundamentally rethinking liquid staking with a mission to prevent Solana from going down the path of Lido's dominant stake protocol and to bring a vision with an infinite LST ecosystem.

At the heart of their product is unique insight. Sanctum's co-founders call it an open "secret" – LST is fungible. Let me explain what that means.

When you validators stake SOL, you create a stake account with SOL and then delegate it to validators. This way, validators don't have direct access to your SOL. This also means that staking is not instantaneous. stake account can only be activated at the beginning of epochs (and deactivated at the end of epochs).

Each epoch on Solana lasts about 2 days. Similarly, when you deposit SOL into a staking pool like Jito, a stake account is created and the stake is delegated to long validators determined by the protocol. In return, you get a liquid staking Token. Another way to look at this is that LST is a tokenization version of stake account.

This means that whether it's a stake account created directly to the validators stake SOL, or a stake account created when you deposit SOL into a staking pool, what's behind it is the same – locked SOL. This mechanism unique to Solana is the foundation of Sanctum's innovation in the liquid staking space.

Reserve and routing

Usually, when users want to redeem LST, they have two options.

1. They can interact with issuance protocol, deactivate their stake account, and wait for the cooling-off period (2-4 days) to end to get their SOL, or
2. They can trade through LST-SOL pairs on DEXs for instant liquidity.

Since users may hold LST first to reap the benefits of instant liquidity, they will prefer the second option. This means that LST without liquidity will be inefficient and unattractive to users. This benefits big players and makes it difficult for Newbies to create an attractive LST. Liquidity begets Liquidity.

Sanctum Reserve changes this equation by offering a completely new LST redemption method. Recall that LST is nothing more than a wrapper around the stake account that contains locked SOL. This means that LST can always be redeemed for its value in SOL, just not immediately.

Sanctum Reserve is a pool with over 200,000 SOL worth over $30 million. When users want to redeem LST, they exchange their stake account with Sanctum reserves in exchange for instant liquid SOL. Subsequently, Sanctum deactivated the stake account and received the SOL paid at the end of the cooling-off period.

As a result, SanctumReserve temporarily faces a shortfall in SOL for the duration of the cooling-off period and will eventually be recovered. Sanctum charges a dynamic fee based on the percentage of SOL remaining in the reserve pool. This ensures the effective use of SOL during periods of high liquidity demand.

Compared to traditional liquidity pools, Sanctum Reserve is a significantly more capital-efficient LST clearing method. In traditional pools, the SOL in the LST-SOL pair is deposited by users who would otherwise earn yield by staking it. In addition, each LST needs its own liquidity pool, which disperses liquidity across the ecosystem. The Sanctum Reserve frees up SOL in swap pairs to stake by providing a universal pool to liquidate any LST, while unifying Liquidity across LSTs – all with minimal slippage. In simple terms, all the liquid stake Token on the Solana benefit from Sanctum's reserves. But how do they get stake protocol to integrate them? This is where the router comes into play.

Sanctum's second product is the Sanctum Router, developed in collaboration with Jupiter. As you might guess from its name, it provides a mechanism to easily and efficiently swap between any two LSTs on Solana. When a user wants to exchange a LST, let's say JitoSOL for hSOL validators issuance by Helius, here's what happens behind the scenes:

1. Withdraw accounts from JitoSOL to a new account
2. Destroy JitoSOL
3. Deposit the new account into the Helius validator's account
4. Minting hSOL
5. Transfer the minting hSOL to the user's Wallet

All of this happens in a single transaction and benefits from the insight that behind the different LSTs are fungible accounts. The Sanctum Router combines Jupiter's routing system to ensure that any LST, regardless of its liquidity, can be exchanged for any other LST.

Together, Router and Reserve have exchanged more than 2.2 million SOL to date.

The existence of these two products has changed the landscape of small LSTs. They no longer need to rely on Depth liquidity pool to entice users to buy LST. Instead, they guarantee instant redemption and liquidity for holders, or a frictionless swap with low slippage between any two LSTs. This also makes LST more useful in the Decentralized Finance ecosystem. For example, borrowing protocol can rely on Sanctum Reserve to settle long wick candle loan to any LST.

Significant drop barriers to establishing a LST have sparked an innovation boom in Solana liquid staking areas.

Single validator LST

Since LST is just a stake account package, each validators can have its own LST. But what's the point? When stake locally, the APY of a large long validators is more or long less the same, which means that validators have no way to distinguish themselves. Earlier this year, as I delved deeper into the world of Solana validators, long validators told me that their biggest challenge was to attract more long stake.

LST, backed by Sanctum's Router and Reserve, provides them with a way to do just that. Issuance your own Token allows stakers to participate in the broader Decentralized Finance space and come up with additional ways to reward holders of staked assets.

Laine, one of the top validators on Solana, rewards laineSOL holders with additional block rewards (beyond the composition of APY), allowing holders to earn more than twice the local stake yield. Similarly, validators Juicy Stake recently issued a SOL to all Wallet Airdrop who hold at least 1 jucySOL.

Throughout the article, I've been mentioning that liquid staking is a tough start for small players. Japan's independent validators issuance's LST picoSOL went from $0 stake rise to $8.5 million in less than 30 days by becoming an active community member and sharing above-average rewards with holders. Recently, picoSOL has been integrated into marginfi, one of the top lending protocol on Solana.

By removing the burden of creating liquidity pools, LST allows small, newly formed, troubled, or ambitious validators to compete with big players. This makes the Solana validators set more decentralized and competitive. Ultimately, it also provides users with a more long validators option without giving up Liquidity and high APY selectivity.

Infrastructure releases LST

Infrastructure projects, such as Solana RPC providers Helius and Jupiter, have also released their own LSTs, but for slightly different reasons.

Solana recently transitioned to a stake-weighted implementation feature that "allows leaders (Block producers) to identify and prioritize transactions through stake validators agents as an additional Sybil resistance mechanism." This means that validators with 0.5% of the stake will have the right to transmit 0.5% of the packets to the leader.

As an RPC provider, Helius' main goal is to read and write transactions on-chain as quickly as possible. Given these network changes, the quickest way is for them to run their own validators. Helius validators do not charge commissions and pass all rewards to their stakes. For them, running a validator is an operational expense, not their core business. With hSOL LST and the right partnerships, they can more easily attract stake volume (Helius can also experiment with programs like RPC credit discounts to hSOL holders.) ）

Jupiter runs a validator for very similar reasons and releases JupSOL. The more long Jupiter's validators have stake, the easier it will be for them to send successful transactions to the Solana network, resulting in faster fulfillment of user orders. Like Helius, Jupiter passes all fees to stakes.

In fact, to attract more long stake, they commissioned an additional 100,000 SOL to increase JupSOL's earnings, making it one of the highest-yielding LST on Solana. Although JupSOL has been launched for less than a month, it has already attracted more than $150 million in TVL.

Project LST

We've also seen some experiments with Solana projects issuance their own LSTs.

For example, Cubik, a public funding protocol on Solana (similar to Gitcoin), recently released iceSOL LST with the help of Sanctum. All stake returns from iceSOL are used entirely to fund public goods on Solana. Therefore, for any Solana believer who holds native SOL, they can convert it to iceSOL without incurring any loss of coins while supporting public goods on the network.

Pathfinders, an NFT project on Solana, has its own LST called pathSOL. pathSOL holders will not only receive NFT minting Allowlist, but the LST will be locked in the NFT forever. If users wish to receive a refund of their minting price, they can redeem their SOL back by burning the NFT. At the same time, the Pathfinders team earns on all locked SOLs.

Finally, Bonk, one of the top memecoins on Solana, recently released their own validator and LST called bonkSOL. What are the benefits of holding? In addition to receiving stake earnings, holders can also receive $BONK Token as rewards.

It is conceivable that this trend will continue. For example, Tensor, where long SOL is idle in the bid, can launch tensorSOL and accept the Token as an offer as a way for users to earn more long (or add a gamification layer to give away the accumulated earnings as a lottery ticket).

SocialFi x LST

One of the most interesting emerging trends in the Solana LST landscape is the possibility for individuals to issuance their own LST.

One of the early proofs was fpSOL, issuance by Sanctum founder FP Lee. Those who hold at least 1 fpSOL can enter a private chat group with FP Lee (similar to Friend.tech Secret Key) while stake rewards for charity.

It's not hard to imagine that this will become more common, with influential individuals issuance LST as a safer option for their followers than NFT or memecoin. They can get distribution through social media (as in the PicoSOL example, it doesn't take long to attract staking), provide holders with exclusive benefits, and earn money by keeping some or all of the proceeds.

Sanctum Infinity

Sanctum's third product is Sanctum Infinity. It is a long LST liquidity pool that supports swapping between all LST in the pool. The team claims that Infinity has the most capital-efficient Automated Market Maker (AMM) design possible. Let's see how it works.

Whenever you want to buy 1 SOL worth of LST, you will always get less than 1 unit of LST. This is because LST accumulates stake rewards over its lifetime, and these rewards are reflected in its price relative to SOL. As of May 8, JitoSOL was valued at $162, while SOL was trading at $146. The JitoSOL/SOL ratio is 1.109, which means that it has provided about 11% return for SOL since JitoSOL's release. This rate will continue to increase over time.

Each LST has a staking pool account with two parameters: poolTokenSupply (total SOL deposited) and totalLamports (deposited SOL + accumulated rewards). Lamports are to Solana what sats to Bitcoin – the smallest unit of measurement. Dividing these two parameters gives us the stake ratio.

How Solana stores stake pool information

Sanctum Infinity uses this in-protocol information as an infallible on-chain Oracle Machine to provide perfect pricing data for every LST in the pool. Traditional AMMs rely on the ratio of asset pairs in their pool for pricing. This can be inefficient if liquidity is low or if there is a temporary imbalance caused by block trading. staking pool account information allows the Infinity AMM to price each LST perfectly, regardless of its Liquidity.

The Infinity Pool is currently an LST basket licensed by Sanctum. Users can deposit allowed LST into the pool in exchange for INF Tokens. INF accumulates stake rewards for all deposited LSTs as well as transaction fees for exchanges conducted within the AMM. Therefore, the INF itself is an LST but has an additional source of income.

Sanctum attempts to maintain the target distribution of different LST within the pool by dynamically changing the interchange fees from one LST to another LST in order to achieve good yields for INF holders, while also providing Liquidity for smaller LST startups. To do this, 20% of the pool is allocated to new LSTs, while the remainder is TVL-weighted to all other LSTs. Over time, the team's goal is to add more long parameters to the assignment strategy.

Infinity maintains the target allocation by dynamically adjusting the interchange fee from one LST to another LST until the target ratio is reached. The fee for each LST is divided into two parts: the input fee, which is the fee paid when exchanging the LST; The output fee, that is, the fee paid when exchanging into the LST. The total cost is the sum of both.

If I want to exchange JitoSOL (0.02% input fee, 0.03% output fee) for JupSOL (0.04% input fee, 0.05% output fee), I will have to pay JitoSOL's input fee plus JupSOL's output fee, for a total of 0.07%. By dynamically adjusting the input and output charges of the LST, Sanctum maintains the target allocation of the AMM pool.

Since its launch last year, Sanctum's product, TVL, has risen to more than $500 million, making it the fifth-largest protocol on Solana.

Future

The term "democratization" is often used in tech circles to describe how a process that would otherwise have a high barrier to entry becomes open to those who historically had no access to it. Sanctum has largely democratized liquid staking. A natural extension of this argument is often that Solana's staking ecosystem is more innovative than Ethereum's. I think there are longest nuances in this.

While Lido was growing, Decentralized Finance was still a junior division, and Ethereum itself, at the time, was transitioning from PoW (PoW) to PoS (attestation). There are too long variables and too few precedents. In contrast, Solana's staking ecosystem was built after Lido existed for longest years. As we've seen, Solana's developers did try to copy Ethereum's playbook. So, it's safe to say that they took inspiration from it.

But replication does not provide any competitive advantage. In this article, the story we see between Lido, Jito, and Sanctum is the story of how an existing player (from Ethereum) competes and is outpaced by a smaller, more flexible, and more localized protocol participant. Can Sanctum's advantage over Solana be sustained? We don't know. As with large longest innovation cycles, new players will emerge to compete with Sanctum's position in staking.

But one thing is clear: between Sanctum's reserves ($30 million worth of SOL) and their routers (integrated into Jupiter), Sanctum is growing into an entity outside of "yet another stake provider." There's value in that.

By Nancy, PANews

Recently, after the Blockchain identity platform Humanity Protocol announced that it had received $30 million in financing at a valuation of $1 billion, the CEO was revealed to have founded a unicorn company Tink Labs and went bankrupt, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of investors' funds to be lost. At the same time, Worldcoin, which also belongs to the DID track, is controversial due to the upcoming huge Token unlock, global regulatory setbacks, and the failure of OpenAI's blessing effect.

The new unicorn Humanity Protocol is off to a bad start, Worldcoin is mired in word-of-mouth and business development difficulties, and the two major $1 billion market capitalization unicorns in the DID track are facing a new test.

**DID protocol using ** palm recognition technology, CEO Zeng Zhi founded a former unicorn company bankrupt **

Humanity Protocol is considered to be the same track project as Worldcoin.

Established in 2023 as a Polygon CDK-based identity system, Humanity Protocol was developed by the Human Institute, Animoca Brands, and Polygon Labs to provide an accessible and non-intrusive way to build human proofs in Web3 applications. Humanity Protocol plans to launch a testnet in the second quarter of this year, and its waiting list has exceeded 510,000 people.

In terms of biometrics, unlike Worldcoin, which uses iris scanning, Humanity Protocol uses palmprint recognition, which is considered a less intrusive authentication scheme. However, iris recognition has the advantages of uniqueness, stability and non-replicability of identity recognition compared with palmprints, and has more advantages than other biometric technologies in terms of comprehensive security performance, and due to the high requirements for the accuracy and stability of this technology, the difficulty of development and the cost of research and development are also large.

In terms of complete ownership of user data and identity, Humanity Protocol, like Worldcoin, has introduced zk-SNARKs technology; In terms of financing background, Worldcoin has completed longing rounds of luxury financing, but its valuation of 1 billion has been realized in Series A financing, and Humanity Protocol has also completed longing rounds of financing. At present, Humanity Protocol has officially announced that it has received a $30 million seed round led by Kingsway Capital and participated by long 200 institutions including Animoca Brands, Blockchain.com and Shima Capital, and has raised about $1.5 million among a group of KOLs, according to PANews, the KOL round is valued at $60 million.

Not only that, but Humanity Protocol is just as easy to access on smartphones as Worldcoin. The project will release an app that uses a phone camera to scan palm prints for identity verification, and will later introduce another layer of security, using a network of palm veins and a small infrared camera for identification. In the future, this system is expected to be applied to the KYC process of financial platforms, and even to enter physical places such as hotels and office buildings through palm prints. In addition, Humanity Protocol plans to issue tokens to pay for verification fees.

Commenting on the launch of the project, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal commented that Humanity Protocol is not only truly resistant to Sybil attacks, but also natively integrates verifiable credentials into a network of Decentralization validator Nodes, laying the foundation for building a wider range of Blockchain and real-world applications.

After attracting market attention due to its high valuation, Terence Kwok, CEO of Humanity Protocol, was later reported by foreign media Protos to reveal that the smartphone company that had almost bankrupted its $1.5 billion valuation and burned $170 million of investors' funds.

It is understood that Terence Kwok founded Tink Labs, headquartered in Hong Kong in 2012, with 12 million users worldwide, and has received joint investment from FIH Group (a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group), Kai-Fu Lee's Innovation Factory and Meitu Chairman Cai Wensheng, mainly to provide hotels with smartphones for guests to use during their stay, with the goal of providing guests with an alternative to roaming fees to improve their hotel experience and sell the collected customer preference data. Interestingly, one of the reasons behind Tink Labs' acquisition of heavyweight shareholders is that Terence Kwok's father, Guo Desheng, is a former Goldman Sachs star private banker, and his major clients include Lee Shau Kee, Kwok Henian and other super-wealthy.

According to the Financial Times, Terence Kwok began to lose money for longest reasons, including aggressive expansion policies, roaming fees becoming cheaper and more popular, and hotels not wanting to pay for the phones he gave away, with losses of nearly $200 million in 2017 and 2018 alone, and then a liquidity crisis. SoftBank, an investor in Tink Labs, was concerned that the company was "moving funds from the Japanese joint venture to other regions to maintain operations," forcing the company to abruptly halt a major project, according to a former employee. Kwok allegedly struggled to pay its employees and contractors and eventually made mass layoffs before closing Tink Labs on August 1 of that year. In January 2020, Tink Labs' European division began liquidation, followed by bankruptcy proceedings.

The former head of HR operations at Tink Labs said, "I never thought it would last, but I didn't expect it to close so soon, Kwok only cares about 'making money.'" According to a previous report by Fortune Insight, Terence Kwok also said during the startup of Tink Labs, "Once the business fails, you can return to school, the opportunity cost is the lowest, and starting a business for three months is like studying an MBA." ”

Worldcoin** is about to unlock large Tokens, facing regulatory investigations in longest countries**

While Humanity Protocol is being hotly debated in the market, Worldcoin is in dire straits due to issues such as Token unlocking, regulation, and insider cash-outs.

According to the analysis released by Decentralized Finance researcher @DefiSquared on the X platform recently, Worldcoin may become the largest wealth transfer event in this cycle, and Worldcoin has a serious inflation problem, with a fully diluted market capitalization of Token WLD as high as $60 billion, which depreciates by 0.6% per day due to the token issuance of issuance and operator claims, and the unlocking volume of WLD will increase significantly in the next few months, which may lead to a large-scale sell-off.

According to @DefiSquared analysis, on the one hand, the supply of WLD will increase by 4% every day once Worldcoin's VC and the team's Token start unlocking. According to Token Unlocks data, WLD will face $31.5 million per day selling pressure starting July 24 (based on May 16 prices).

At the same time, not long ago, Worldcoin revealed on its blog that World Assets, a subsidiary of the foundation responsible for token issuance of the project, will sell 500,000 to 1.5 million WLD per week for private sale for the next six months, with a maximum value of $179 million at current value. @DefiSquared pointed out that this portion of the Token is equivalent to 16.7% of the existing circulating supply (based on 210 million Circulating Supply on May 16) and is sold at a discount, with this portion of the WLD Token supply being used to sell to counterparties for the benefit of the Foundation.

"Worldcoin's Token Economics model was designed from the start to be predatory to benefit teams and early investors. In December last year, the foundation even deliberately terminated the market maker contract (note: Worldcoin previously announced that it would terminate the protocol with 5 market makers on December 15, 2023), allowing the price to be squeezed up at a low Circulating Supply. "According to CoinGecko's latest research data, WLD is one of the four encryption projects with the lowest circulating supply among the top 300 market capitalization**. In this regard, @DefiSquared believes that this manipulative design of low liquidity and high valuation directly benefits insiders, as they can lock in shares through contracts and OTC Trading Hedging high valuations before unlocking.

In addition, @DefiSquared also noted that most long retail investors may not even know that Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) is no longer actively involved in Worldcoin and that the project has no relationship with OpenAI. According to a Bloomberg report in April this year, at that time, Worldcoin was looking for cooperation with tech giants such as OpenAI.

It is worth mentioning that Worldcoin is also facing regulatory bans or investigations in longest places around the world such as Spain, Portugal, South Korea and Hong Kong due to user data privacy issues, so Worldcoin's main supporters not only met with relevant governments to improve government relations, but also open source iris recognition inference system this year to enhance transparency and implement a new personal data self-custody strategy, and recently open source the new SMPC system and securely delete old iris code to help improve biometric data security. Similarly, for Humanity Protocol, it may also face regulatory issues arising from the collection of user data.