Golden Weekly is a weekly blockchain industry summary column launched by Golden Finance. The content covers key news of the week, market and contract data, mining information, project trends, technology progress and other industry trends. This article is a project weekly, giving you an overview of the progress of mainstream projects and star projects this week.
Bitcoin
10x Reaearch: Bitcoin may have a strong trend in April
10x Reaearch posted on social media that April is often a relatively strong month for Bitcoin. In the past ten months, six months have had positive returns, with an average return of 12%. The likelihood of another strong move in April is relatively high, especially as the first quarter tends to be challenging and most of Bitcoin's returns tend to be generated in the fourth quarter.
Bitwise CEO: Bitcoin halving in April this year may be the most influential in history
Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said on the X platform that the Bitcoin halving in April 2024 may be the most influential in history. The reason is that the last Bitcoin halving occurred in 2020, and the Bitcoin price was about $9,000. Therefore, in US dollars, the supply reduction was about $9 million per day, and about $3 billion per year. The Bitcoin halving is about $70,000, which will increase more than 3 times in US dollars: about $32 million per day, about $11 billion per year. Natural sales have been greatly reduced, while seeing growing demand.
Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped by 0.98% to 83.13T
According to BTC.com data, the difficulty of Bitcoin mining has been adjusted at block height 836640, with the mining difficulty reduced by 0.98% to 83.13T. The current average computing power of the entire network is 595.44EH/s.
BlackRock CEO: Surprised by Bitcoin's Rise
Larry Fink, co-founder, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, a $10 trillion asset management company, said in an interview that he was "pleasantly surprised" by the retail response to the company's spot Bitcoin ETF and declared that he was very optimistic about the long-term viability of Bitcoin. Larry Fink said that before we submitted the application, we would never predict that there would be such retail demand. I was surprised by the size of Bitcoin's increase, and we are creating a more liquid and transparent market. In addition, IBIT is the fastest growing ETF in the history of ETFs.
US Bitcoin Miner Giga Energy to Open Factory in Argentina
American bitcoin miner Giga Energy has expanded its operations into Argentina. The company’s new site utilizes methane released by natural gas combustion, which Giga converts into electricity, and has already mined between $200,000 and $250,000 worth of bitcoin.
Research: Bitcoin volatility in the US session is greater than in the Asian session, and the current trading focus has shifted to the US
Research firm Kaiko said an indicator tracking the difference between bitcoin's hourly high and low prices showed greater volatility during the U.S. session than in Asia, and trading focus has now shifted to the United States.
Ethereum
ConsenSys submits comment letter to the US SEC, advocating approval of spot Ethereum ETF
Ethereum infrastructure provider ConsenSys has submitted a comment letter to the SEC advocating for approval of a spot Ethereum ETF. The letter counters the SEC's concerns about potential fraud and manipulation, as well as concerns about Ethereum's proof-of-stake consensus design. ConsenSys emphasizes Ethereum's security as superior to the framework that supports existing Bitcoin ETFs. The letter highlights Ethereum's fast block finality, distributed verification process, high attack costs, reduced penalties, and environmental benefits. The SEC's deadline for a decision on VanEck's spot Ethereum ETF application is May 23.
Vitalik: As L2 transaction costs decrease, there is no reason why Ethereum won’t be widely adopted
Following the Ethereum Dencun upgrade and the introduction of blobs, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared his insights on the future direction of Ethereum scaling. Vitalik highlighted the shift in Ethereum scaling from foundational scaling work to centralized, incremental enhancements. Vitalik also said that developers' focus will shift to the application layer. Ethereum will maintain an L2-centric roadmap, and applications will migrate from L1 to L2 to benefit from faster, more cost-effective transactions. One of the upcoming upgrades is Data Availability Sampling (DAS), which aims to increase the data space per slot to 16 MB. Incremental scaling improvements include gradually increasing blob capacity, improving data compression, and EIP-7623 (which aims to reduce the maximum block size). Vitalik noted that with the reduction in L2 transaction costs, there is no reason why Ethereum will not be widely adopted.
US Congressman writes to SEC Chairman to clarify whether Ethereum is a security
Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to the SEC chairman, asking for clarification on whether Ethereum is a security. The move was made in response to the announcement by digital asset company Prometheum that it plans to provide Ethereum custody services. Republicans are concerned that classifying Ethereum as a security could affect the market, noting that it could cause exchanges to stop offering Ethereum derivatives, with serious consequences for market participants. They urged the SEC to provide more clarification on this issue.
Grayscale Chief Legal Officer: SEC did not conduct in-depth discussions on Ethereum spot ETF because relevant issues have reached a consensus on Bitcoin ETF
On March 26, Grayscale Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm posted on social media that the market does not need to be pessimistic about the Ethereum spot ETF's approval in May because the SEC has been slow to have in-depth dialogues with issuers on the Ethereum spot ETF. Because Grayscale and other issuers had active and constructive dialogues with the SEC a few months before the launch of the Bitcoin spot ETF, and consensus has been reached on details such as creation/redemption procedures, cash and physical, AP, LP, and custody. These issues do not need to be discussed again on the Ethereum spot ETF.
Grayscale Chief Legal Officer: Ethereum Spot ETF Will Be Approved in May
On March 26, despite recent news that the U.S. SEC "lacked contact" with applicants, Grayscale believes that the spot Ethereum ETF will be approved in May. Grayscale Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm posted on the X platform that I don't think the lack of involvement of regulators means that there will be one result or another. I personally will not be deterred by this. I think the (Ethereum spot) ETF should be approved.
other projects
Bitcoin Layer 2 Project Bitlayer Launches $50 Million Ecosystem Incentive Program
On March 29, Bitlayer, a Bitcoin Layer2 infrastructure project based on the BitVM paradigm, announced the launch of a $50 million ecological incentive program to promote the development of its mainnet ecosystem. The registration for the first phase of the incentive activity, called "Ready Player One", will start at 09:00 UTC on March 29, 2024, and end at 09:00 UTC on April 29, 2024, and will officially begin after the launch of the Bitlayer mainnet. Specific activity rules and reward distribution guidelines will be disclosed in subsequent announcements. Through a series of ecological incentive programs such as "Ready Player One", Bitlayer aims to accelerate ecosystem development and incentivize projects to be deployed on the Bitlayer mainnet. In addition, Bitlayer promises to provide comprehensive ecosystem support for all projects, including potential foundation and institutional investment, initial liquidity support, comprehensive product development resources, guidance and investment opportunities from top incubators, support from the Bitcoin community and OGs, ecosystem cooperation and co-creation, etc.
Bitcoin L2 project BEVM is launched on the mainnet
On March 28, Bitcoin Layer2 project BEVM announced the launch of its mainnet on the X platform. Its mainnet is open to everyone, based on the Taproot consensus to achieve complete decentralization, and uses MAST to achieve automatic signing.
Huang Licheng's Meme Project Bobaoppa is about to distribute tokens to early supporters
On March 30, according to official news, Huang Licheng's Meme project Bobaoppa announced that it would be launched ahead of schedule, and tokens would be distributed to early supporters about an hour later (around 15:10). In response, Huang Licheng also posted that the airdrops were not received at the same time, and it would be better and fairer for early supporters to receive their tokens at the same time. (But the standards for early supporters were not announced).
ALITA Binance Chain MEME project paid full compensation of $2.95 million due to technical errors
On March 28, after ALME/BNB went online last night, due to a technical operation error, the contract permissions were discarded, and all pre-sale tokens distributed in advance were locked and not released. This is equivalent to destroying 50% of the tokens. After the accident, the ALITA consortium held an emergency meeting and decided to fully compensate for the pre-sale of 3,000 BNB, involving 3,949 wallet addresses. In view of the existence of fraudulent projects, users should pay attention to identify the tail number d0f7f7912b of the ALME contract. At present, the project is still paying full compensation to the wallet address that killed the block within a few minutes after the opening.
Meme project Hone will refund funds if fundraising fails to reach expected target
On March 27, the Meme project Hone (Honeybadger) initiated by X (formerly Twitter) KOL Yo (@web3yoyoyo) raised more than 20 million USDT, with a goal of raising 50 million USDT. Due to the impact of the Ents project issued by KOL VT, Hone announced that the fundraising failed and will arrange for technical personnel to refund the funds. Yo said that he had previously experienced a contract loss of 100 million US dollars and would not choose to run away with 20 million US dollars in fundraising funds. According to the official introduction, "Hone is a full-chain meme and is already developing the meme protocol. In the future, any project party of the meme protocol can initiate fundraising in the protocol, but the project party cannot access the funds. The currency name/avatar/quantity/fundraising amount/time/pool percentage/treasury/refund, etc. can be set, which is equivalent to the meme version of ordi. Opening the funding entrance of all chains is in the interests of all chains."
Ordinals Developer: Runestone is not an NFT collectible, but a Meme coin
On March 29, Ordinals developer Leonidas posted on social media that everyone mistakenly regarded Runestone as an NFT collection, but within a month, everyone will regard Runestone as Memecoin. If a randomly pre-sold Memecoin can soar to a market value of $1 billion overnight, imagine what Memecoin on the Bitcoin chain can do.
