Cryptocurrency startup Superform Labs has raised $6.5 million in seed and angel funding rounds, with Polychain Capital leading the seed round and BlockTower Capital, Maven 11, Circle Ventures and others participating. Angel investors include Arthur Hayes, Marc Bhargava, and others.
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Zhu Xiaohu posted on social media that the most reliable investments in 2024 will be AI chips and Bitcoin-related stocks: mining machines > MSTR > Coin > BTC.
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According to Binance market data, ORDI has broken through $70 and is now trading at $71.214, with a 24-hour increase of 13.12%.
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IntentX, a derivative trading protocol based on intent, has announced the completion of a $1.8 million strategic round of funding. The round was led by Selini Capital, with participation from Orbs, Mantle Ecofund, Mirana, Kronos Research, and Manifold Trading.
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Farcaster’s total revenue has reached $600,000, showing that not only are crypto individuals interested in using the platform, but they are also willing to pay for it.
The decentralized social media platform’s early success resembles that of FriendTech in some ways. When the latter launched, it experienced multiple waves of attention, with fees rising in large spikes before ultimately fading away as the attention dissipated and the project failed to find sustainability. While Farcaster is today’s social platform of choice among the crypto community, the question remains whether it will be able to find what FriendTech didn’t: longevity.
Farcaster’s first wave of attention was in early December 2023, when the platform saw a small bump in users paying for platform storage. The second wave started in late January and appears to have peaked in early February. This recent wave was far larger and saw a massive rise in user signups, the number of daily users, and the number of posts per day — largely driven by the launch of the in-app engagement tool Frames.
Frames have helped to drive up demand by bringing native monetization into the app. A common use of Frames is to provide another Farcaster user with an NFT if they follow the original poster’s account and repost their Frame. The lure of grabbing free NFTs and other potential airdrops attracted much of the crypto community to expand from Twitter and Discord to Farcaster in much larger numbers than ever before (despite figureheads like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin having made the switch to other social media platforms including Farcaster long before).

How does Farcaster generate revenue?
Yet unlike most social media platforms, Farcaster isn’t free to use. Farcaster charges its users a small fee to post on the platform and ongoing storage fee costs to host the data that’s generated by daily use.
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The posting fee is $0.01 per post, although there are a number of reward mechanisms that provide free posts. The storage fee is $5 per year for 5,000 posts, 2,500 reactions and 2,500 follows. Part of these fees go to the platform and some are used for paying transaction fees and processing credit card information.
There is some reasoning for this. The main one is that charging fees per post could help prevent spam. The other is that, in order for the project to be sufficiently decentralized, it needs to work on its own systems without a company paying to store everyone’s data and funding that through advertising. Instead, by having users pay for their own storage costs, the platform is able to escape the trappings of centralized control.
That said, users are clearly attempting to keep fees to a minimum. When making transactions, through Frames for instance, users will still need to pay blockchain transaction fees. These can be on a number of different blockchains, including even the Ethereum mainnet until recently.

Over the last few weeks, most Farcaster users have switched to using the Coinbase-built Base network for on-chain transactions — peaking at 83% of transactions, according to data from Dune Analytics. This will largely be due to the network’s low fees. It may also have been helped by Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero being a former Coinbase vice president, while current Coinbase protocol lead Jesse Pollak is one of the most popular users on the platform, the data shows.
While Farcaster and FriendTech are very different platforms, with quite different forms of monetization, they do share the experience of being the crypto community social app du jour, largely due to speculation on potential airdrops. Yet Farcaster is about to face the reality that the community won’t stay around for long, unless it manages to find a flywheel effect — something that’s easier said than done.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
© 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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Bakkt, a platform for crypto payments and digital assets, has filed an amendment to its quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission warning that it may not be able to continue its business over the next 12 months due to changing risk factors in the crypto industry. The company has been experiencing struggles with its crypto business and is seeking ways to raise capital. Bakkt has determined that its future success will depend on its ability to raise capital and is evaluating financing alternatives to meet its cash requirements. Following its SEC filing, Bakkt's stock dropped 7.6% on Wednesday, trading after-hours at $BTC #BNB是币圈新人最好的情人，她永远爱你会更多！后来者居上✌️

Analog, a blockchain interoperability project building cross-chain communication infrastructure, has raised $16 million in a seed and strategic funding round.
Tribe Capital led the round, with NGC Ventures, Wintermute, GSR, NEAR, Orange DAO, Mike Novogratz’s Samara Asset Group, Balaji Srinivasan and others participating, Analog said Monday. The firm started raising the round in October and closed it in December, Analog co-founder Victor Young told The Block. The funding was realized via a simple agreement for future tokens, or SAFT, Young said, adding that the round brought Analog’s fully diluted valuation to $120 million.
Young, a blockchain developer and investor, founded Analog in 2021 with Sanchal Ranjan, a former Y Combinator-backed entrepreneur and currently a “genesis member” of Orange DAO. Young said that Analog’s core team is based in Bangkok and Zurich.
Analog, a blockchain interoperability project
Analog is building cross-chain communication tools for interoperability across multiple blockchain networks. Its core products include Timechain, a Rust language-based blockchain network; a generic message-passing protocol; Analog Watch, a developer-facing product; and Timegraph SDK and API suite that will allow application builders to compose applications across multiple chains.
Analog can be compared with Axelar or LayerZero, but Young said Analog is more developer-focused.
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“We are building all the necessary features for cross-chain development as a single toolkit as opposed to relying on third parties such as oracles to achieve the desired functionality,” he said.

Analog is built on Substrate, Young added, noting that it will allow the upgradability of Analog easier than its competitors if there are new proving mechanisms.
Analog testnet and mainnet launch
Analog’s public “incentivized” testnet is scheduled to be released at the end of the first quarter or early second quarter, Young said. The mainnet is planned to launch in the late second quarter, he added.
There are currently 30 people working for Analog, and Young is looking to hire more people across functions, including engineering and business development, with fresh capital in hand.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
© 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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Whale Alert monitoring shows that at around 6:01 Beijing time, 75,887,800 USDC (worth $75,899,183) was transferred from an unknown wallet to Coinbase Institutional.
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According to Dune data, the number of user addresses bridged on the Base chain, an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution supported by Coinbase, has exceeded 400,000. At the time of writing this article, it has reached 403,956, and the bridged TVL on the chain has reached 329,641 ETH, worth more than $800 million.
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According to CertiK's monitoring, ZBexchange hackers have deposited 1313 ETH into Tornado Cash in the past few hours. In the past 3 days, a total of 2023.1 ETH (about $4.9 million) has been deposited into Tornado Cash.
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BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) has surpassed $5 billion in assets under management, reaching $5.453 billion at the time of writing.
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The Uniswap Foundation announced that the release of Uniswap v4 is scheduled for the third quarter of 2024. The first phase involves code freezing (in progress), including completion of core code, testing, gas optimization, security enhancement, and final determination of peripheral devices. The second phase involves auditing and testing on the testnet, with comprehensive audits by multiple auditing companies and community audit competitions. At the same time, v4 will be deployed on the testnet and the code will be adjusted. The third phase involves launching and pushing, with v4 being pushed to the Ethereum mainnet in the third quarter.
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on February 13th, Arbitrum's Layer3 solution for ecological games XAI announced on social media that they are "studying the development of DAO proposals to allocate 100 million to 200 million ARB for game development."
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Last week, Polygon MATIC
-3.69%
introduced the “type 1 prover”— a technology that can facilitate EVM-compatible chains to adopt zero-knowledge proofs.
The type 1 prover is expected to be released later this year. It will be incorporated into Polygon’s CDK (software stack), marking an advancement over the project’s previous type 2 proving mechanism, which lacked compatibility with other EVM chains. “The type-1 prover can generate zero-knowledge proofs for any EVM chain without necessitating hard forks or adjustments to existing clients,” Brendan Farmer, a co-founder of Polygon, told The Block.
Polygon Labs wants to leverage the prover to transition a wide range of blockchains, including side chains and optimistic roll-ups, into validiums — a specialized form of Layer 2 networks that utilize zero-knowledge proofs for enhanced efficiency and reduced transaction costs.
Validiums store only zk-proofs on the Ethereum mainnet, with actual transaction data held off-chain, supported by a data availability solution. This structure contrasts with ZK-Rollups, which also have to publish proofs of app data on the Ethereum mainnet.
Farmer stressed that projects can also choose to become full-fledged ZK-rollups if they want to make use of their type-1 prover. At the end of the day, it’s up to the teams to make that decision, he clarified.
The move to ZK-based network
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Moving to a ZK-based network (like validiums or ZK-rollup) can potentially offer advantages to Layer 2 projects, including the elimination of the seven-day withdrawal delay associated with optimistic rollup solutions (e.g., Optimism and Arbitrum).
This delay, Farmer said, has been a point of contention because it incurs additional time and costs for users relying on third-party bridges for transactions.
“It’s like tens of millions of dollars paid to third-party bridges, and if you look at what it would have cost to prove all of the transactions on those optimistic rollups, it’s like a few hundred thousand dollars,” Farmer added. “Users are being forced to bear a lot of costs on Optimistic Layer 2s that are just unnecessary, and an upgrade to a ZK-based network just fixes this.”
Following the ZK transition, chains can be connected through Polygon’s interoperability protocol — the AggLayer — which promises interoperability and unified liquidity for Layer 2s. The first version of the AggLayer is planned to be released in February, enabling developers to connect blockchains.
The objective will be to ensure uniform security across modular and monolithic chains, including those within the Polygon ecosystem. AggLayer will be a critical component of Polygon 2.0, the next iteration of the Polygon network. Unlike typical interoperability solutions, it will aggregate ZK proofs from all connected chains.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
© 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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Immutable announces that RPG NFT game Pixelmon will be developed on Immutable zkEVM, and Pixelmon is launching a battle arena on the platform.Pixelmon CEO and LiquidX co-founder @GiulioXdotEth said, "Through collaboration with Immutable, we have solved the pain point of seamless execution of in-game transactions."
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Celsius, the crypto lender that filed for bankruptcy in 2022, said in a court document filed Friday that it has distributed most of the crypto owed to its creditors. Celsius started the process at the end of January, and is on track to distribute $3 billion worth of crypto, it previously said.
"Nearly 75% of the BTC
-0.01%
/ ETH
-2.22%
set to be distributed by PayPal/Venmo and through Coinbase has already been collected," the company's law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, said in a an update filed with the court on Thursday.
According to the document, Celsius has distributed $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency, transferring 20,255.66 BTC and 301,338.77 ETH to 171,672 creditors.
Cash and stock
The estate will send wire transfers to its overseas creditors eligible for cash distributions but are based in jurisdictions where bank checks are not in use.
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"The Post-Effective Date Debtors have received numerous communications from creditors who are concerned about their inability to deposit a check from a US bank in their jurisdiction, and the Post-Effective Date Debtors believe the option for wire transfers will help resolve a majority of these concerns," the document stated.
The filing also said that creditors eligible for receiving shares of the new mining company created using the remaining assets of Celsius would receive emails from the transfer agent, Odyssey Transfer and Trust Company.
Former Celsius users who made withdrawals from the platform in the 90 days leading to the bankruptcy were reminded that they had to return part of the funds they took out before their claims can be distributed.
Celsius filed for bankruptcy in 2022, following the discovery of a $1.2 billion hole in its balance sheet. The company made its way out of the bankruptcy in November.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.
© 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
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