This week in review | Ethereum has undergone the Cancun upgrade on the Goerli testnet; Binance Web3 wallet airdrop is now live.
BlockBeats will compile industry news highlights for the week of 1.15-1.21 in this article, and recommend in-depth articles to help readers better understand the market and industry trends.
Weekly News Recap
Binance New Coin Mining Launches 44th Project Manta (MANTA) and 45th Project AltLayer (ALT)
On January 15th, Binance launched the 44th project for new coin mining, Manta (MANTA), which can be mined using BNB and FDUSD for a total of 2 days. On the same day, Manta Network's token economics was announced, with a total supply of 1 billion MANTA tokens and an initial supply of 251 million tokens. For more information, please read: "Binance's Latest Launchpool: MantaNetwork Details and Price Predictions".
On January 17th, Binance launched the 45th new coin mining project, AltLayer (ALT), which can be mined using BNB and FDUSD. Users can invest BNB and FDUSD into the AltLayer mining pool on the Launchpad website starting from 08:00 on January 19th, 2024 (GMT+8) to receive ALT rewards. The total mining period for ALT is 6 days. On the same day, AltLayer announced its token economics, with a total supply of 10 billion and an initial circulation of 1.1 billion. For more information, please read: "Understanding Binance's Latest Launchpad Project AltLayer: What to Expect from the RaaS Protocol with Strong Investment Background?"
Binance Web3 Wallet Airdrop Goes Live
On January 16th, the Binance Web3 Wallet airdrop went live. Completing tasks within the Binance Web3 Wallet will allow you to share in the rewards. By completing swap interactions on Maverick Protocol or providing liquidity through the wallet, you can participate in the $80,000 USD worth of MAV token airdrop rewards.
Starknet Core Members Apologize for Incorrect Use of "E-beggar"
On January 16th, abdel.stark.eth (@dimahledba), a core member of Starknet and a contributor to Ethereum, apologized on his personal social media platform for "insulting" community users by using the term "e-beggar". He stated that the use of this term was a mistake and that he initially thought it was interesting in the context of its use. He was also emotionally driven and did not consider the consequences of his words. In addition, Uri resigned as CEO of StarkWare, which caused him to lose control and react emotionally. "I want to clarify that I have never targeted the entire community. It has always been used in the context of specific individuals who I believe are abusing and disrespecting people I care deeply about. I know this is not an excuse, but I want to be honest. For those who feel targeted by my words, I apologize." Abdel.stark.eth stated that Starknet needs builders and users, and will be more careful in choosing appropriate language in the future.
Gray scale sold BTC shares for 6 consecutive days after GBTC was converted to spot ETF, and Bitcoin has fallen more than 15% in nearly 10 days, causing market concerns.
Since the approval of Bitcoin spot ETF, many ETFs have achieved net inflows, but Gray scale has sold 52,639 BTC shares for 6 consecutive days after GBTC was converted to spot ETF, and Bitcoin has fallen more than 15% from this year's high, causing market concerns. According to Coinglass data, the total asset management scale of Bitcoin ETF has reached 29.16 billion US dollars. Among them, the top three Bitcoin ETFs in terms of asset management scale are: GBTC with an asset management scale of 23.537 billion US dollars; BITO with an asset management scale of 2.279 billion US dollars; IBIT with an asset management scale of 1.172 billion US dollars.
Morgan Stanley's analysis team stated that GBTC investors have been purchasing GBTC at a significant discount over the past year in preparation for its eventual ETF conversion, and have been profiting from the conversion after approval. During the period of 2023, approximately $3 billion was invested in GBTC in the secondary market. (At the time of the statement, GBTC had only $1.5 billion in outflows, and analysts predicted an additional $1.5 billion in outflows in the future.) If GBTC loses its liquidity advantage, it may see more capital outflows, resulting in an additional $5 billion to $10 billion in outflows.
Manta website suffers from DDoS attack, Korean community questions market manipulation; team responds by compensating affected users and distributing tokens to Bithumb to ensure liquidity
On the evening of January 18th, Manta Network's gas fees surged, causing almost all airdrop users to be unable to claim their tokens. The official announcement confirmed that the network was under a DDoS attack and had accumulated a large number of recent transaction queues. This led to longer transaction times and affected gas prices. On January 20th, Manta Network announced that it will compensate users who spent high gas fees during the DDoS attack on the network.
On January 19th, the Korean community reported that Manta was suspected of money laundering and market manipulation on the day it was listed on the Bithumb cryptocurrency exchange in Korea. On-chain data shows that Bithumb initially received approximately 2.7 million Manta tokens, of which 2 million were deposited from a single address. Further tracking indicates that these tokens may have originated from Manta team's official wallet and are associated with Manta team's Korean BD. In addition, abnormal Ethereum buying behavior was detected after the listing on Bithumb, and a total of 2,094.64 Ethereum was subsequently withdrawn from Bithumb to the same address where the Manta tokens were deposited earlier. Manta Network officials stated that on January 18th, 2024, they reserved a total of 3 million MANTA tokens from the unlocked 50 million ecological fund token distribution to expand the Korean ecosystem. Of these, 2 million MANTA tokens have been distributed to Bithumb to ensure liquidity. These funds will be used to invest in and promote the growth of the Manta community in Korea, specifically by supporting local developers and communities to enhance Manta's presence in the region.
Musk and Vitalik related "Meme" trend swept in, becoming the hot topic of community discussion this week
On January 9th, Musk changed his Twitter profile to (CTO) chief Troll Officer, and then the meme coin TROLL with the same name soared in price. On January 13th, the UX/UI designer of Doge coin tweeted with Musk's new profile, "X's chief troll officer now has 169 million fans", once again pushing up speculative emotions. On January 16th, TROLL rose by 76.19% in 24 hours, with a market value of $76.9 million. On January 16th, Musk posted a meme image, and the price of SMILEY rose due to the inclusion of "meme" and "smiley" elements in the text. On the same day, SMILEY rose by 895% in 24 hours.
On January 14th, vectorized.eth, the protocol lead of music NFT platform Sound.xyz, tweeted that after learning about Zuzalu, he believed that "if you don't support Zuzalu, I will question your ETH consistency." Vitalik also replied to this statement in the comments, expressing his support for Zuzalu. The meme coin with the same name, ZUZALU, saw a 197% increase in the past 24 hours, with a market value of $5.7 million. Read more: "What are the speculative logics behind Ethereum meme coins, as 'troll' TROLL surges 100 times in a week?"
Bitcoin surpasses silver to become the second largest ETF commodity category in the United States, with the cumulative trading volume of US Bitcoin spot ETF exceeding 11.1 billion US dollars
On January 18th, Jag Kooner, the derivatives director of Bitfinex, stated that just one week after trading began, the management assets of the US Bitcoin ETF had surpassed the silver ETF, becoming the second largest ETF commodity category in the United States. Bitcoin spot ETF funds (including the conversion of Grayscale's GBTC trust) currently hold about 647,651 bitcoins, with assets under management reaching 27.5 billion US dollars. Among them, the assets under management of Fidelity Bitcoin spot ETF exceeded 1 billion US dollars. The assets under management of BlackRock Bitcoin spot ETF exceeded 1 billion US dollars. As of January 18th, the cumulative trading volume of 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs exceeded 11.1 billion US dollars on the fourth trading day. Among them, Grayscale, BlackRock, and Fidelity continue to dominate, accounting for more than 90% of the total trading volume.
Ethereum conducted the Cancun upgrade on the Goerli testnet on January 17th
The 178th Ethereum core developer execution meeting (ACDE) reconfirmed the Cancun upgrade time on the Goerli testnet as January 17th, and set January 30th and February 7th as the upgrade dates for the Sepolia and Holesky testnets respectively. If everything goes smoothly, developers will release the Sepolia/Holesky clients during the week of January 22nd. In addition, the 179th ACDE meeting will be held on January 18th. If there are any issues within the first 24 hours after the fork, the upgrade time will be rescheduled. Developers have also decided that Ethereum's next upgrade will be the Prague/Electra (Pectra) upgrade. Related reading: "Ethereum Core Developer Latest Meeting Summary: Dencun Hard Fork, Prague/Electra Proposal"
Blast Testnet is officially launched
On January 17th, Pacman, the founder of Blur, announced that the Layer 2 network Blast's testnet is officially launched. At the same time, Blast announced the "Blast BIG BANG" event aimed at attracting Dapps to join the network.
Jupiter Creation: JUP token to be launched on January 31, first releasing meme coin
On January 16, Meow, co-founder of Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter, announced that the protocol token JUP will be launched at 10:00 am Eastern Time on January 31. Prior to the launch of JUP, the team plans to test the new release platform, which will include two major tests. One of them is to test mockJUP, which is currently available on DEX.
This Week's Popular Articles
The life and death of MetaMask
MetaMask may be facing its toughest challenge since its inception. Many cryptocurrency users have reported uninstalling the MetaMask plugin, and many new cryptocurrency enthusiasts who have entered the circle through other means have never even heard of the name. MetaMask no longer seems as indispensable as it once was. Faced with intensified external competition, internal product logic misalignment has led to a sharp decline in its competitiveness. Despite the bullish cryptocurrency market, MetaMask is now in a crisis of survival, as its parent company ConsenSys, which emphasizes ideology, cannot embed a user-centric product spirit into its moat.
In November 2023, Sei Labs took full advantage of Sei's mature advantages and launched a major upgrade of Sei v2 - the world's first parallel EVM. This innovation not only opens up new doors for EVM developers worldwide, but also marks an important step for Sei in fully utilizing Solana and Ethereum - the two super-optimized execution layers. Recently, BlockBeats conducted an in-depth interview with Jeff Feng, co-founder of Sei. Jeff graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a data analyst at Yelp and a TMT financial personnel at Goldman Sachs. He later joined Coatue Management (Bay Area) as a venture capitalist and founded Sei in 2022. In the interview, Jeff delved into Sei's past progress, future trends, and parallelization of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Sei v2 version.
With the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF by the SEC this week, the price of Bitcoin has fluctuated accordingly: after the approval, the highest point reached more than $48,000, and then it has been declining, experiencing a platform period of around $46,000 for a period of time before falling below the lowest point of $42,000. Among the issuers of the newly launched spot Bitcoin funds, BlackRock led with a trading volume of $564 million on Friday, while Fidelity's trading volume was $431 million. Both of these are inferior to the trading volume of Grayscale's GBTC - this ETF had a trading volume of $2.29 billion on Thursday and $1.83 billion on Friday, accounting for more than half of the total trading volume.
The narrative of Layer 2 in the Ethereum ecosystem continues to gain momentum, with impressive token price data for ARB, OP, and METIS, which rank in the top three in terms of TVL. Among these three, Metis is worth paying attention to in the near future. On January 12th, Metis released a proposal to activate community testing, with the aim of helping Metis developers conduct stress tests on the new architecture. On January 15th, Metis launched the first season of community testing, with a focus on incentivizing interaction with dApps.
Arthur Hayes: Bitcoin ETF will create arbitrage opportunities
After the approval of Bitcoin ETF, both the cryptocurrency industry and traditional financial institutions are closely watching the impact of this event on the global financial market. In this article, Arthur Hayes analyzes the reasons for the approval of Bitcoin ETF - Bitcoin's anti-inflation properties make it an ideal asset in the current global inflationary environment, and Bitcoin ETF provides an opportunity for those who want to avoid inflationary effects but cannot leave the traditional government-controlled range of funds. Then, Arthur Hayes conducts a thorough analysis of the market impact that Bitcoin spot ETF may bring, and explains in detail the creation and redemption process of ETFs, as well as the arbitrage opportunities that may exist in the operation of Bitcoin ETF.
SAVM's price surged nearly 50 times in one day. Who developed SatoshiVM?
Recently, the Bitcoin ZK Rollup Layer 2 solution SatoshiVM has caused a stir on Twitter, and its native token SAVM has achieved nearly 50 times increase on the first day of trading. According to blockchain data from Bubblemaps, the wallet starting with 0xe77fb sent SAVM to 250 influencers, and the top four holding addresses hold about 40% of the token supply. In addition, crypto researcher @0xBoboShanti investigated the developers of SatoshiVM and found that their team may come from Bool Network. BlockBeats has compiled and translated two tweets on this topic.
Checklist of projects that have the opportunity to receive airdrops by staking PYTH
New cycle's (3,3)? TIA staking leads to "Ponzi expectation" of airdrop model
The re-pledge of TIA and the airdrop of DYM are undoubtedly one of the hottest topics in this bull market, and various re-pledge track projects have also received attention. Those who missed DYM are eager to search for re-pledge projects to obtain potential airdrops amid FOMO. In response to this, TaikiMaeda2, the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency research company HFAresearch, posted a long article on social media platform expressing his thoughts on TIA.
一个决定「带崩」NFT 市场，复盘 Flooring Protocol 如何导致蓝筹出现普跌？
Translation: Last week, the NFT market experienced a general decline, with blue-chip NFTs such as BAYC, Azuki, and DeGods all falling by more than 10% in a week. Surprisingly, the source of this general decline may be the mechanism update of the NFT fractionalization protocol, Flooring Protocol, which was established six months ago. Flooring Protocol will restart in January 2024 and launch a groundbreaking new model that links the price of governance token FLC to the valuation of mainstream NFT collections through µToken.Review of 6 potential projects on Celestia
Under the narrative of SOL-ES-TIA, the market value of TIA has risen. Cryptocurrency researcher ARNDXT has compiled six potential projects based on Celestia, including gaming chain Ancient, rollup bridge Hyperlane, ZK scheme Skip, rollup protocol Cartesi, infrastructure Union, and re-staking mechanism Alt Layer, and elaborated on the factors that make them promising. BlockBeats has translated the original article.
How to understand the threat of Celestia to Ethereum, another Ethereum "killer"?
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