Compiled by: Luan Peng, ChainCatcher
“What important events happened this week (10.8-10.13)”
1. Vitalik: 12 months ago, the discussion was about L1 “extracting rent” from L2, now the situation is the opposite
Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform that he does think there is a discrepancy between the status quo. 12 months ago, the discussion was about L1 "extracting rent" from L2, and now the situation is the opposite. We don't want a mixed economy where the tax rate jumps from 5% to 95%.
If we can design economics so that both L1 and L2 fees accumulate reliably far from zero (i.e. the variance of the ratio is low), many people will be much happier. We need to maintain an ecosystem where the Ethereum community feels like they are on the same team, including the technical interoperability part, the values/culture part, and the economic part, and EIP-7762, Base Rolls, and other forms of fee sharing are all valuable starting points.
2. Neiro CTO responded to the doubts: Choosing Gotbit as the market maker was a stopgap measure in the rush to go public, and he is willing to take responsibility for this misjudgment.
In response to crypto detective ZachXBT questioning why Neiro initially chose Gotbit, which has a very bad reputation, as a market maker, Neiro CTO co-head "S" responded that when Justin Sun's Twitter asked him to list HTX, he actually only had a few hours to find one, and time was tight. Gotbit was chosen because the market maker offered a stay agreement at the time, which was the most affordable option so far. Second, the project saw it as a quick solution for HTX listing (the agreement with Gotbit was for 3 months), and then planned to explore other options when the budget was larger. Third, it lacked experience in judging the industry. Although it had heard all kinds of bad things about Gotbit, it had also heard all kinds of bad things about almost everyone in the industry, so it was difficult to make a judgment.
“S” also said: “I had no direct contact with Gotbit before, so I chose to trust them and give them a chance. Gotbit also advertised itself as a “meme coin friendly” market maker, which seemed to be an attractive proposition.”
“S” concluded: “But at the end of the day, I take full responsibility for this and I should have been more careful. I am heartbroken by this outcome and I paid a huge price for it. At the same time, this has also been a huge learning opportunity for us, and it has forced us to fundamentally improve the project by working with better and more market makers to reduce counterparty risk and upgrade the markets where Neiro trades.”
Earlier news, in response to Neiro’s announcement to terminate its partnership with market maker Gotbit, Chain Detective ZachXBT said that perhaps Neiro should explain to the community why it chose Gotbit in the first place, because their reputation has always been bad. Before the U.S. government accused them of fraud and market manipulation this week, there was a lot of evidence that Gotbit had engaged in pump and dump behavior.
3. Len Sassaman’s widow: Sassaman is not Satoshi Nakamoto, and HBO never contacted her during the production process
According to DL News, many users on Polymarket believe that the new HBO documentary will point to the late American cryptographer Len Sassaman as the creator of Bitcoin.
Sassaman's widow, Meredith L Patterson, said HBO did not contact her during the production process to say that Sassaman was not Satoshi Nakamoto. She mentioned that the documentary may not reveal the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
In addition, Belgian security researcher Patterson believes that Sassaman cannot be Satoshi Nakamoto, for reasons including rookie mistakes in Bitcoin's early design.
4. Scroll (SCR) Token Economics Announcement: Initial Circulation Supply Accounts for 19% of Total Supply, Launchpool Accounts for 5.5%
According to the Binance announcement, the total supply of Scroll (SCR) tokens is 1 billion, and the initial circulation supply is 190 million (19% of the total supply). Scroll's smart contracts will be deployed on the Scroll network. The total Launchpool reward is 55 million SCR, accounting for 5.5% of the total token supply. Among them, 85% of the rewards (46.75 million SCR) are allocated to the BNB pool, and 15% of the rewards (8.25 million SCR) are allocated to the FDUSD pool.
5. Former Russian investigator sentenced to 16 years in prison for receiving $73 million in Bitcoin bribes, the largest bribery case in the country’s history
According to Decrypt, former Russian investigator Marat Tambiyev was sentenced to 16 years in prison for accepting approximately $73 million in Bitcoin bribes during his investigation of organized crime. This amount is more than five times the previous highest bribe amount in Russian history.
Marat Tambiyev was accused of transferring half of the criminal gang’s bitcoins to his own wallet and leaving the other half to the criminals. Investigators found the bitcoin wallet key in a folder named “pension” on his laptop.
Marat Tambiyev has maintained his innocence in court and argued that his actions helped the state recover some of the gang's proceeds. He plans to appeal the verdict, according to Russian state media. Currently, one-third of the bitcoins that were stored on Marat Tambiyev's computer have been recovered, and the whereabouts of the rest are still unclear.
6. Chairman of the Financial Services Commission of South Korea: Will review the monopoly of the virtual asset market centered on Upbit
Kim Byung-hwan, chairman of the Financial Services Commission of South Korea, said that the monopoly phenomenon in the virtual asset market centered on Upbit will be reviewed. During the national policy inspection of the National Assembly Political Affairs Committee, Kim Byung-hwan responded to the questions from lawmakers about Upbit's monopoly structure and pointed out that a comprehensive review will be conducted through the Virtual Asset Committee.
The lawmakers also questioned Upbit’s partnership with K-Bank, saying, “K-Bank’s total deposits are 22 trillion won, of which Upbit’s deposits account for 4 trillion won, or 20%. If Upbit’s trading is disrupted, K-Bank may experience a run.”
7. Former FTX executive Ryan Salame announced his new position as a prisoner on LinkedIn before going to prison, and added the skills of "cleaning and wood chipping"
Former FTX executive Ryan Salame shared his new status on LinkedIn before going to prison, Ryan Salame "happily" announced his new position as an inmate at FCI Cumberland.
He also updated his profile, adding "cleaning and chipping wood" as one of his skills.
Earlier news, former FTX executive Ryan Salame's request to postpone his sentence was rejected by the judge.
8. The “.io” domain name may disappear due to geopolitical influences
The British government announced that it would give up its sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean and transfer it to the neighboring island nation of Mauritius. Once the treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will no longer exist. International agencies will update their records.
Previously, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) nominally assigned ".io" as a country code top-level domain name (ccTLD) to the British Indian Ocean Territory. The return of the Chagas Islands will cause the British Indian Ocean Territory to disappear, and the corresponding ISO-3166 two-letter country code IO and the ".io" domain name may also be cancelled.
It is reported that many users and businesses regard ".io" as a generic top-level domain (gTLD) rather than a specific country. As of 2023, approximately 1.2 million ".io" domain names have been registered, a large portion of which are companies related to cryptocurrency.
9. Market News: Unrecognized microstate Liberland elects Justin Sun as acting prime minister
According to a document disclosed by @tier10k, the internationally unrecognized micro-nation of Liberland has announced the results of its latest parliamentary elections. Justin Sun, founder of the TRON (TRX) network, won the election and was nominated by Liberland President Vit Jedlička as acting prime minister. According to an official statement from Liberland, the votes were counted at 5 a.m. Central European Time on October 6, marking the first full deployment of the country's blockchain-based election system. The election process uses a simple set of rules and is fully algorithmic, designed to provide transparency and eliminate doubts about the election results.
It is reported that Liberland is a self-proclaimed country established in 2015. It is located on the border between Serbia and Croatia, covers an area of only 7 square kilometers, and has not yet been officially recognized by any sovereign state or international organization.
10. The US SEC, FBI and DOJ jointly filed a lawsuit against four fraudulent crypto companies
According to Cointelegraph, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Justice (DOJ) jointly filed a lawsuit against four crypto companies suspected of fraud and market manipulation on October 9, including Gotbit Consulting, ZM Quant Investment, and CLS Global. Two lawsuits were also filed against individuals related to the case, a total of nine individuals were sued, and some defendants agreed to separate settlements.
Gotbit Consulting and its marketing director Fedor Kedrov were accused of manipulating the market through wash trading on behalf of individuals who promoted cryptocurrencies called Saitama and Robo Inu. Two other companies, ZM Quant Investment and CLS Global, face nearly identical charges related to a token called NexFundAI, which was created by the FBI. ZM Quant and four people associated with Pham were also charged over another crypto asset, SaitaRealty Coin.
The Justice Department listed 18 people and one additional company facing charges in the combined cases: MyTrade MM also provided services to NexFundAI.
The persons involved in this case are located in multiple countries, including the United States, Russia and India, reflecting the complexity and extensiveness of the case.
“What are some interesting articles worth reading this week (10.8-10.13)”
1. Scroll airdrop allocation caused controversy: How does Binance Launchpool's high quota affect SCR prices?
Yesterday, SCR was officially launched as Binance's first pre-market trading project. After opening, it experienced a sharp rise and fall, and is currently consolidating around $1.1. As of press time, SCR's pre-market trading price is $1.186.
On October 8, Binance and Scroll officially announced that the SCR token will become Binance's first pre-market trading project and announced its token economics. As soon as the news was released, the community questioned that Scroll's airdrop quota was too low and the Lauchpool quota was too high, which was a gesture of goodwill to Binance. In response, Sandy, a core contributor to Scroll, tweeted that Binance is the best channel for global distribution. It will open up upstream and downstream channels and help Scroll develop to the next stage, especially in emerging markets. Scroll's ETH deposits and withdrawals are now available on Binance, and soon, stablecoin support on Scroll will also be available directly on Binance. This listing on Binance will help Scroll achieve global expansion.
Later, Scroll co-founder Zhang Ye also tweeted to refute the view of "kneeling to CEX". He said that this is a strategic decision to establish a partnership to promote growth and gain wider support, and Binance has strong support for the entry and exit of stablecoins. Secondly, the timing of the current coin issuance is completely different from the situation when ETH, Arbitrum and Optimism were launched, and CEX does not have the same leverage in distribution. He also explained that Launchpool's budget comes from growth, not community airdrops, and does not affect the rights and interests of the community. Token distribution is not a one-time event, it is a growth lever, and project construction requires long-term growth. Scroll's technical roadmap and the next stage of ecological growth planning will be released in a few weeks.
2. Roundtable discussion: What is the biggest obstacle to the development of the intention track?
This Thursday night, ChainCatcher held an X Space with the theme of “When will ‘Intent’ Explode?” and invited senior builders in the intent track to share their insights and opinions.
3. Ethereum ETF is coldly received: Why are investors unwilling to pay for it?
Ethereum ETFs haven’t received as much attention as Bitcoin ETFs, and even saw net outflows this week. Tom Carreras investigates.
The performance of Ethereum spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has failed to attract the same demand as Bitcoin spot ETFs.
But given the enormous popularity of Bitcoin products, that’s a tall order.
Disadvantages include the lack of staking returns for ETFs and the difficulty in marketing Ethereum to investors.
For many investors, the performance of spot Ethereum ETFs has been disappointing.
By comparison, spot bitcoin ETFs have handled nearly $19 billion in inflows over a 10-month period, while the Ethereum ETF, which began trading in July, has failed to generate the same traction.
To make matters worse, Grayscale’s ETHE, which existed as an Ethereum Trust before converting to an ETF, suffered massive redemptions during the conversion process, while demand from other Ethereum funds failed to offset this trend.
This means that Ethereum ETFs have experienced $556 million in net outflows since launch. According to Farside data, this week alone, these products have seen net outflows of $8 million.
So why is the Ethereum ETF behaving so differently? There are several possible reasons.
4. “Meme’s DWF” was accused of fraud. In addition to Neiro and Bonk, what other projects did Gotbit make markets for?
On October 9, U.S. federal prosecutors filed charges of market manipulation and fraud against four cryptocurrency “market makers” and their employees, with the SEC and FBI also involved in the investigation. Gotbit, the market maker behind the so-called “meme DWF”, Bonk, and Neiro, is on the list.
Currently, Gotbit's CEO Aleksei Andriunin has been arrested in Portugal, and two of Gotbit's employees in Russia have also been indicted.
As early as a year ago, the on-chain detective ZachXBT had exposed Gotbit’s market-making practices and warned users to be wary of any project that cooperated with Gotbit. Since then, Gotbit has also been controversial because of the suspected rugs in multiple tokens involved in market making.
However, Gotbit’s market-making service still attracted a large number of project parties and meme teams. According to Gotbit’s official X platform, Gotbit provided market-making services to about 50 project parties such as Neiro and Hamster Kombat this year, most of which were memes.
5. New trends in meme hype: capitalization dispute, donations from Vitalik Buterin, and cult culture revival
On October 9, on-chain detective ZachXBT disclosed the holdings of Meme coin analyst representative Murad’s on-chain address, which quickly attracted the attention of the crypto community and triggered a narrative of revival and hype of old Meme coins. The layout of low-market-cap MEME coins is becoming an unspoken secret in the crypto community.
In fact, since Binance listed three Meme coins (Neiro, Turbo and BabyDoge) in one day on September 15, triggering a dispute over the capitalization of Neiro and NEIRO tokens, the Meme coin market has set off a new round of hype. During the National Day holiday, reports about the Meme project were everywhere, and the community was full of stories of getting rich overnight. Vitalik sold the gifted MEME coins twice on the chain and publicly expressed his gratitude to the MEME project, causing the zoo coin Hippo MOODENG to increase nearly 100 times in a short period of time, which attracted investors to rush in, hoping to capture the birth of the next 100-fold MEME coin.
However, unlike the irregular and crazy rise in the hype of Meme coins in the past, this round of Meme coin hype mainly revolves around: the dispute over the capitalization of the naming letters, donations from Vitalik Buterin and Vitalik Buterin selling coins to boost the market, and the revival of Cult (sarcasm culture) MEME coins.
6. What is OpenGradient, an open source AI platform incubated by a16z startup accelerator and favored by Balaji?
Today, the centralized open source AI platform OpenGradient announced the completion of a $8.5 million seed round of financing. a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, Foresight Ventures, SV Angel, Coinbase Ventures, SALT Fund and Symbolic Capital participated in the investment. Angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin and Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal and other well-known industry figures also participated as angel investors.
The funds will be used to continue building decentralized infrastructure, deploying solutions and tools for AI and Web3 developers, and advancing applied ML research to grow the open source AI ecosystem on blockchain. OpenGradient's testnet is expected to be open to developers in the fourth quarter of 2024.
In early September, OpenGradient was also selected for the a16z Crypto Fall Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) program. a16z CSX will invest at least $500,000 in each selected company, and the program will be trained for 8 weeks in New York City, gain first-hand experience with top crypto founders, receive guidance and support from the a16z crypto investment and operations team, and connect with other companies and the broader a16z network.
According to the official website, OpenGradient is the first decentralized platform for open source AI model hosting, secure execution, proxy reasoning, and application deployment. OpenGradient's new heterogeneous AI computing architecture (HACA) enables permissionless AI reasoning, statistical analysis, data processing, and proxy execution to run securely and scalably end-to-end through smart contracts, while building a web platform designed to accelerate AI research. OpenGradient enables developers to seamlessly leverage open source models and use computing to implement risk management, ML optimization, AI agents, anti-sybil, defi mechanism design and other functions.
7. Increase Ethereum throughput by 50%? Quickly learn about the new community proposal EIP-7781
Recently, a new EIP (EIP) in the Ethereum community has sparked discussion. The new EIP-7781 proposal aims to increase the overall throughput of the Ethereum network by shortening block times and increasing data processing capacity. This proposal was proposed by Ben Adams, co-founder of Illyriad Games, on October 5. In simple terms, it will shorten the block generation time from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, increase the data processing volume of the block, and increase the throughput by 50%. In addition, it also plans to reduce the fees of the Ethereum Layer 2 network by increasing rollup-based delays.
Ben Adams described EIP-7781 as increasing transaction throughput by about 33% without increasing the number of individual blocks or blobs; distributing bandwidth usage over time to reduce peak bandwidth requirements and maintain network efficiency; this is equivalent to increasing the number of blobs from 6 to 8, or increasing the gas limit from 30M to 40M; but this approach does not increase peak bandwidth.
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, expressed support for the proposal. He believes that shortening the slot time to 8 seconds will significantly improve the overall performance and user experience of the network. This change can not only increase network throughput by 50%, improve the efficiency of DEX (such as Uniswap v3), save approximately US$100 million in CEX-DEX arbitrage costs every year, but also optimize Layer by shortening the confirmation time by one-third. 1 User experience of smart contracts. At the same time, reducing slot time can also better distribute peak loads, making resource utilization of execution clients during non-validation peak periods more balanced, in line with Ethereum's long-term expansion goals. Despite the risk of increased time gaming, Justin Drake sees the change as a key step toward a more efficient, scalable network.
8. Promote the real use cases of DeAI and focus on the underlying protocol of decentralized AI, KIP Protocol, to bring millions of Web2 AI users to Web3
The AI+Web3 track has become active again. In the past month, the AI+Web3 track has disclosed nearly 20 financings, and leading institutions such as a16z and Binance Labs have made consecutive moves. However, with the rampant "high FDV" projects this year, the AI+Web3 narrative favored by capital has once deterred many crypto users.
In fact, with exchanges such as Binance "cracking down" on high FDV projects, and other participants in the crypto market reflecting on the high FDV dilemma in recent months, the market has also undergone some potential changes. Looking at the recently active AI+Web3 projects, some projects are strictly controlling FDV and making efforts to apply it, breaking away from the vicious circle of selling coins at high valuations with only narratives.
Recently, KIP Protocol, a decentralized AI infrastructure layer led by Animoca Ventures and Tribe Capital, is one of them. KIP Protocol is the first underlying protocol that supports the decentralized retrieval-augmented generation network (dRAG) and is also the leading project in the dRAG track.
KIP Protocol attempts to solve the pain points faced by AI model makers, App developers, and data owners when trying to decentralize through dRAG, allowing knowledge and data to be protected and monetized as intellectual assets, ensuring that they interact with artificial intelligence without losing ownership.
KIP Protocol is currently accelerating the implementation of applications in fields such as "DeAI+Education" and "DeAI+Entertainment", bringing millions of Web2 users into Web3 and promoting the large-scale adoption of "Web3+AI".
9. RootData: 2024 Q3 Web3 Industry Investment Research Report
In Q3 2024, the total number of financing events reached 321, a decrease of 25.69% from the previous quarter, and the total financing amount was US$2.406 billion, a decrease of 15.04% from the previous quarter. Projects/investors are adjusting their strategies, looking for cash flow and high liquidity to adapt to declining yields and demanding valuation analysis.
10. Real-life fight in the cryptocurrency circle: Bankless founder beat up Synthetix founder
On October 11th local time (October 12th morning Beijing time), Synthetix founder Kain Warwick and Bankless founder David Hoffman had an offline real-life fight in Salt Lake City, Utah.
This game is co-organized by Permissionless and the fighting live broadcast platform Karate Combat. Permissionless is a cryptocurrency-themed conference co-organized by Bankless and Blockworks. The conference will give free tickets to the fighting event to users who hold tickets.
From the perspective of conference marketing, it is not difficult to understand why David chose to participate; as for Kain, he had reached a $500,000 bet with David on the scale of Bankless' sponsorship (essentially investment) of its new project infinex.
