1. Former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Finance of China: The US encryption policy has undergone a fundamental change. How should China respond?
On September 28, 2024, Zhu Guangyao, former vice minister of the Ministry of Finance of China, said at the 2024 Tsinghua PBC Chief Economist Forum that the digital economy has a special asset "cryptocurrency". In the past decade, the United States generally believes that cryptocurrency has huge destructive power and market risks. However, since 2024, the US encryption policy has undergone a fundamental change. China needs to study the latest changes and policy adjustments in the international community. Zhu Guangyao bluntly stated that the current gap between China and the United States in cryptocurrency is that "China does not participate" and called for facing the problems and solving them in regulation. Click to read
2.Coinbase: Outlook for the Crypto Market in Q4 2024
Our impression from the Token2049 conference was that sentiment among crypto investors seemed fairly positive, though this could be related to the event coinciding with the Federal Reserve’s 50 basis point rate cut on September 18. However, while many market participants were bullish on BTC, we encountered some skepticism about ETH, as the token did not appear to benefit from the launch of a spot ETH ETF in the U.S. more than two months ago. (Note that many attribute this to the recent surge in Ethereum Layer 2 activity, but we’ve previously explained why we believe this is an incomplete explanation for ETH’s underperformance relative to its peers.) Additionally, some believe that there are more higher beta instruments (such as L2 tokens) benchmarked to ETH today than in the previous cycle, which is leading to a crowding-out effect. Click to read
3. Variant co-founder: The next decade of smart contract blockchain
The first decade of smart contract blockchains was born out of Bitcoin’s original cypherpunk values: censorship resistance, open source, permissionless, and a new hope for a democratic/fair internet on a shared world computer.
4. Why does the "Fat Protocol Theory" no longer work in the current encryption environment?
The Fat Protocol Thesis has done a huge disservice to the space and set us back years. I actually love the Fat Protocol Thesis and highly recommend reading it if you haven’t already. The simple version of the theory is that protocols (e.g. blockchains) will capture more value than the applications built on them. Why? Partly because crypto applications have weaker moats (they are easily copied). But mostly because the success of applications will drive users to accumulate protocol tokens for use, creating a network effect for the blockchain as each application drives up the token price of the chain it is built on. Click to read
5. Prospects and opportunities of chain abstraction
In this year’s narrative competition, the chain abstraction narrative has grown by 673% (but the top four are still AI, DeFi, Meme, L2, etc.). My view on this is still the same: "Demand drives growth, and growth brings hype" - at least now the market's attention to the chain abstraction track comes from some of the problems encountered by the current industry, such as the complexity brought by multiple chains, cross-chain messaging, etc. The development process of these narratives is a bit like "adding noodles to more water, and adding water to more noodles". Ethereum's performance is limited, so everyone is working on Layer1 and Layer2 in order to solve the congestion caused by user growth. When too many chains are accidentally built, everyone puts their hopes on new technologies, such as chain abstraction and intent abstraction, hoping that they can solve the complexity brought by the development of multiple chains. Click to read
