#ChartoftheDay Berachain, a high-performance Layer-1 (L1) blockchain that runs on a Proof of Liquidity (PoL) consensus, is quickly approaching 100 million unique addresses on its public testnet.
Berachain has been creating a buzz with its modular framework and unique PoL consensus in the crowded L1 space. Since its launch, its testnet has received great enthusiasm from the community, with the testnet and its faucet having experienced congestion many times.
Berachain’s Tri-token model, which consists of $BERA, $HONEY, and $BGT, is unique, too, with each serving distinct roles to enhance the ecosystem's functionality.
#Berachain is now on track to launch its #mainnet within the year after running its testnet for nearly a year. The mainnet launch will also be paralleled with the launch of Berachain’s mainnet token and governance token $BGT and its native stablecoin $HONEY as well as the token generation events (TGE) of many projects in the Berachain ecosystem especially DEXes.
Berachain was valued at over $1 billion in its last fundraising event. As an investor in Berachain, Bing Ventures looks forward to its mainnet launch and the impact it will bring.

#ChartoftheDay ZK rollup project Starknet said on Wednesday that it has shattered the record for transactions per second (TPS) among #Ethereum #Layer2 networks. It reached a peak of 857 TPS in a controlled stress test on October 29. The test averaged 127.5 TPS over a 24-hour period, outperforming Base’s 79.92 record of 24-hour TPS.
Different from the stress test of other networks, Starket’s stress test was conducted with a game called “Flippyflop” developed by Cartridge with Dojo. A press release states, “The tile game saw users competing against bots to check tiles on the grid. Bots worked to undo the gamers’ work by unchecking tiles at random. As such, the theme was 'human vs. machine.' The high pace of simple transactions generated during this game was designed to be the ultimate test for Starknet’s TPS.”
While Starknet is currently behind its competitors in terms of total value locked (TVL) in #DeFi , it is worth watching because of its unique technology and innovativeness. This breakthrough in TPS also means that it could have great potential for on-chain #gaming and consumer apps that require large-scale user interactions.

#ChartoftheDay Phantom Wallet, one of the most popular Solana wallets, is back up and running after it went down yesterday because of a significant backend incident, according to data from SolanaFloor. The downtime coincided with the GRASS token airdrop, which went live 6 minutes before the Phantom outage. Market participants believe the surge in user activity related to the airdrop was the cause.

Although the wallet’s backend infrastructure was resolved in 2 hours and 44 minutes, this raised people’s renewed concerns over the stability of major wallets.

Decentralized #wallets act as the gateway to interacting with #cryptocurrencies and the general #Web3 ecosystem. In the ecosystem of each major public blockchain, there is a dominant wallet application, such as Metamask for Ethereum and other EVM chains and Phantom for Solana blockchain. Despite over a decade of development, on-chain wallets still face challenges, such as system outages, errors, and technical glitches that undermine the user experience.

This exposed some critical issues with the infrastructure sector: projects cannot provide highly professional and reliable services in a specific niche segment. On the one hand, some projects like wallets, which are often equity-based, move especially slow because of a lack of incentives for user engagement and feedback; on the other hand, some other infra projects like pubic chains are chasing the “quick money” with fast token launches while failing to polish their products to the best of their capabilities. From this aspect, crypto infrastructure still has a long way to go in order to catch up with their #Web2 counterparts.

🔥Top #Crypto #Fundraising Events in the Last Two Weeks (Oct 12 - 25)

⚡️From October 12 to 25, 2024, 49 deals were announced, an increase from the previous period. Notably, the two weeks saw some of the largest deals announced.

1. Praxis, invested by GEM Digital Limited, Arch Lending, Manifold Trading
2. Blockstream, invested by Fulgur Ventures
3. Azra Games, invested by Pantera Capital, a16z crypto, A16Z GAMES
4. Yellow Card App, invested by Blockchain Capital, Polychain Capital, Block
5. Bitnomial, invested by Ripple
6. zkPass, invested by dao5, Animoca Brands, Bing Ventures
7. Opacity Labs Inc. Network, invested by Archetype, Breyer Capital, a16z crypto
8. Solv Protocol, invested by Laser Digital, Blockchain Capital, OKX Ventures
9. Variational, invested by Bain Capital Crypto, Peak XV Partners, Coinbase Ventures
10. Validation Cloud, invested by True Global Ventures

#ChartoftheDay The #USelection is turning a white-hot competition. With Elon Musk’s relentless support, Former President #Trump overtook Vice President #Harris for the first time in the Decision Desk HQ/The Hill election forecast.
Meanwhile, on the decentralized prediction market #Polymarket , which has seen over $2.2 billion in betting volume on who will win the 2024 US presidential election, Trump’s rose substantially to 63.7%, whereas Harris' stood at 36.1%.
The outcome of the U.S. presidential election will impact the global economy and the crypto industry. Although both candidates have promised pro-crypto policies to some extent, whether these campaign promises will become a reality or turn out to be just lip service is highly uncertain.
Based on the two parties' styles, it is generally believed that Harris will adopt a more cautious attitude towards the #crypto industry. Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, noted that crypto ETFs tracking smaller coins like Ripple’s XRP or Solana (SOL) are unlikely to be approved under a Harris presidency.
On the other hand, to win the support of the crypto industry, the Trump family has launched a crypto project called World Liberty Financial (WLF) and kicked off its public token sale last week. However, the market reacted poorly to the protocol’s ambitious $300 million fundraising target at a valuation of $1.5 billion, with it raising approximately 3.8% on its first day. Additionally, according to the project’s document, Trump and his family could take home 75% of net revenue while assuming no liability. This makes many people suspicious of whether his support for crypto is genuine.

#ChartoftheDay According to The Block, the betting volume for who will win the 2024 United States presidential race crossed $2 billion on the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket. As of Oct. 17, Republican candidate Trump maintains nearly $608 million in betting volume with a 62.3% chance of winning. Democratic candidate Harris has $405 million with winning odds of 37.5%.

As the November 5 election nears, Polymarket’s prediction market has grown substantially in October, with a 113.7% increase in volume compared to September’s $533.5 million. The platform’s volume for October reached $1.14 billion by mid-month.

This demonstrated the increased interest in prediction markets. On Thursday, Polymarket even rose to the #1 spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store’s list of free magazines and news apps.

However, if the prediction proves inaccurate, the platform could risk losing all the progress it has made toward being regarded as a truth machine rather than a place for random guessing.

Also, many are suspicious of the motivation of one of the largest holders of the pro-Trump side on Polymarket’s election contract. People within the political forecasting community wonder if dark money is trying to manipulate the markets.

#USElection2024

#ChartoftheDay On October 10, #Uniswap Labs introduced #Unichain as a new #Ethereum #Layer2 solution aiming to be the home for DeFi and liquidity across chains.
Unchain is a fast, decentralized, low-cost Optimism Superchain built on the OP stack by Uniswap Labs in collaboration with Flashbots, OP Labs, and Paradigm. The Unichain testnet went live on the same day, and the mainnet is scheduled for release later this year. The Uniswap Foundation will provide grants and programming to support developers building on Unichain.
Validation Network
Unchain will introduce a decentralized validation network that allows nodes to verify blocks. This adds a layer of finality and reduces the risk of conflicting or invalid blocks. In order to serve as a validator, users will have to stake UNI in exchange for rewards, which means the UNI tokens will finally gain utility outside of governance itself.
TEE-based Builder
While Unichain’s testnet launched with one-second block times, its mainnet aims to introduce 250ms “sub-blocks” that will make the user experience feel instant. This improvement is made through a block builder using a trusted execution environment (TEE), which will also improve the transparency of transaction ordering and prevent failed transactions, in addition to improving speed.
A Uniswap app chain has long been rumored. Whether Unchain can mimic Uniswap’s success remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it should be a boon for UNI investors by allowing them to share in the protocol’s revenue.

🔥Top #Crypto #Fundraising Events in the Last Two Weeks (Sep 28 - Oct 11)

The number of fundraising deals fell to 24 from 50 in the last period, and their size also decreased substantially.

1. SecondLive, invested by Crypto.com, Spark Digital Capital, Cypher Capital Group

2. delta, invested by Figment Capital, Variant, DBA

3. The Open Network (TON), invested by Gate Ventures

4. PiP World, invested by Exinity

5. Humanode, invested by Big Brain Holdings, Republic Crypto

6. Bitlayer Labs, invested by Polychain Capital, Franklin Templeton,  SCB Limited

7. Dragonz Lab, invested by Syndicate Capital Group Limited Partnership Fund

8. OpenGradient, invested by a16z crypto, SV Angel, Coinbase Ventures

9. Yala invested by Polychain Capital, Ethereal Ventures, Anagram Ltd

10. RD Technologies, invested by Sequoia Capital, Hivemind, Aptos Labs

#ChartoftheDay Thanks to aggressive stimulus measures announced before the Golden Week break for China’s National Day celebration, China’s stock markets saw their steepest rally in over two years. The Shanghai Composite (#SSE Index) gained over 20% over five sessions. The Hang Seng Index, a market-cap-weighted stock market index in Hong Kong, also posted gains of similar magnitude during the period.
On October 8th, the first trading day back from the Golden Week, China’s stock markets returned with a bang and scaled to more than two-year highs. The same day, China’s top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), unveiled a wide-ranging action plan to support economic growth.
However, by midday today, #chinesestocks tumbled, with a more than 5% reversal so far. While views across the market on whether Chinese stocks can sustain the rally are varied, many believe whether the Chinese government can detail sufficiently big or new measures to inspire confidence will be the key.
#ChinaDrama #StockMarketSuccess

🔥 Top #Crypto #Fundraising Events in the Last Month (Aug 31 – Sep 27)
Our biweekly monitoring shows an average of around 50 deals announced every two weeks in the last month, reflecting continued interest from investors in the primary market.
Top 10 Deals in Sep 14 - 27
1. Celestia, invested by Bain Capital Crypto, 1kx, Robot Ventures
2. TON, invested by Bitget, Foresight Ventures
3. Drift Labs, invested by Multicoin Capital, Blockchain Capital, Folius Ventures
4. Helius, invested by Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital
5. Hemi XYZ, invested by Binance Labs, Breyer Capital, Big Brain Holdings
6. Initia, invested by Theory Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC
7. Mawari Network, invested by Anfield Ltd, Borderless Capital, 1kx
8. Pipe Network, invested by Multicoin Capital
9. Yellow, invested by Consensys, GSR, NxGen
10. Truex, invested by RRE Ventures, Hack VC
Top 10 Deals in Aug 31 - Sep 13
1. Huma Finance, invested by Distributed Global Ventures, HashKey Capital, Folius Ventures
2. Balance (E-Pal), invested by a16z crypto, Galaxy Interactive, Bing Ventures
3. Hypernative Labs, invested by Quantstamp, Inc., Bloccelerate VC, Boldstart Ventures
4. PIN AI, invested by a16z crypto, Hack VC, Anagram
5. Nytro Lab, invested by SevenX Ventures, OKX Ventures, Aptos Labs
6. DRiP, invested by NFX, Coinbase Ventures, Progression Fund
7. Infinit, invested by Electric Capital, Mirana Ventures, Hashed
8. IDA, invested by CMCC Global, Hashed, Hack VC
9. Puffpaw, invested by Lemniscap, Volt Capital, The Spartan Group
10. Moku, invested by Sky Mavis, A16Z GAMES SPEEDRUN, Arca

TOKEN 2049 week is a wrap. Here are some spicey takeaways from our investment team:🤔
1⃣Shifted market focuses –— #AI, #Bitcoin, Real-world Assets (#RWA), and #TON and Solana-based projects were discussed more this year. Comparatively, sectors and narratives like #GameFi, #DeFi, #DAO, and #Layer2, which used to be hot topics in previous years, saw significantly fewer projects participating this year.
2⃣Ethereum's decreased dominance — Many investors used to invest and allocate alongside #Ethereum’s roadmap. With Ethereum’s dwindling dominance, investors are losing guidance.
3⃣Waned investor interests—Many venture capitalists and funds are halting investment in new projects because of this cycle's generally low ROI. Meanwhile, non-European and US VCs suffer from decreasing global influence and face difficulties securing investment in solid projects.
4⃣Positive macroeconomic catalysts expected for the near future — Investors have positive expectations for the remainder of this year, betting on potentially favorable macroeconomic events such as the US rate cuts and the US presidential election. As monetary policies ease, market liquidity will improve.
5⃣Cautious attitude on the economic outlook for the next three years — With US stocks standing at historical highs and rate cut expectations reflecting risks of economic recessions and potentially leading to decreased dominance, investors expect more money to flow into safe-haven assets. This will result in selloffs of risky assets like crypto, which may suffer huge volatility before they can enjoy recoveries and surges.
6⃣Increased market uncertainty — Many projects proliferated in the last two years, and institutional investors' participation has become increasingly prominent, especially in this cycle. The market will need to take at least two to three years to assimilate the projects accumulated. Given the lack of enthusiasm from retail investors, market uncertainty is increasing.
#TOKEN2049Week #TOKEN2049 #Token2049singapore

#ChartoftheDay According to data from Trader T, #Bitcoin spot ETFs have returned to a positive net inflow overall.
Impacted by the recent sluggishness in the crypto market and the volatility in US stocks, Bitcoin spot ETFs suffered over a week of negative net inflows before yesterday.
Nevertheless, in retrospect, the launch of $BTC spot ETFs was successful in many aspects.
According to Form 13F filings with the SEC, over 1,000 institutional investors are currently holding BTC spot ETFs. iShares Bitcoin Trust (#IBIT ) by BlackRock is the most popular one, with over 600 institutional holders. About 20% of IBIT’s shares are held by institutions and large advisors, and analysts project the figure to double next year.
Given the positive market reactions for BTC spot ETFs, Wall Street and financial institutions in other countries are reported to be considering including them as constituents in their asset management products. Initially, the allocation to BTC spot ETFs should not be high. Nevertheless, it signals more profound market acceptance and enhanced regulatory compliance.
Compared to BTC spot ETFs, Ethereum spot ETFs are underperforming the market expectations. For one reason, $ETH spot ETFs only allow for unstaked Ether holdings. For another reason, Ether’s price performance has been unsatisfactory this year.
All in all, spot ETFs are a necessary path for major cryptocurrencies to gain regulatory compliance.

#ChartoftheDay After a year of community-led discussions and consensus, MATIC has been upgraded to POL as the network token for Polygon. According to the official announcement, starting Sep 4, every transaction that takes place on Polygon PoS uses POL as the native gas token.
More about the POL upgrade:
- Backwards compatibility. This ensures that existing applications and users experience a seamless transition without disruption, facilitating a smoother upgrade process and preserving the stability of the Polygon network. Makes it easy for validators, delegates, apps, and users to transition smoothly from MATIC to POL.
- Native gas and staking token for Polygon PoS. POL now secures the Polygon PoS network—and every transaction on the network is fueled by POL.
- Future utility for an aggregated network subject to community consensus. With a staking hub planned for 2025, the current community consensus would see POL support broader roles in an aggregated network in the long term.
- Tokenomic Changes. The initial POL to MATIC upgrade ratio is 1:1, with a critical tokenomics change, subject to ongoing community consensus, that has a 2% emission over a decade to support network security and community development. Half goes to the Polygon PoS staking contract for validator rewards to secure the network, and the other half to a community treasury, supporting builders through a grant program overseen by an independent board accountable to the community. This emission model will continue for as long as needed, with the community holding the power to adjust or discontinue based on evolving needs.
This upgrade lays an essential foundation for Polygon's continued evolution into a multi-pronged, aggregated network. POL will be a crucial part of the massively used Polygon PoS network: It will be used as the native gas and staking token on Polygon PoS and, therefore, fundamental to Polygon network security. Polygon PoS will connect to the AggLayer if it reaches community consensus as part of its evolution into a ZK chain, thereby bringing POL into a broader aggregated network.

#ChartoftheDay In the last few months, #DEFİ project and the issuer of stablecoin DAI, MakerDAO, has been brewing some major changes to their protocol. Last week, MakerDAO announced it was rebranded to Sky. Along with it, it will upgrade and extend itself with two upgraded tokens and several new features, scheduled to go live on Sep 18.
#DAI will upgrade to a new stablecoin, USDS (Sky Dollar), at a 1:1 ratio, and MakerDAO’s governance token, MRK, will become upgradeable to SKY at a 1:24,000 ratio.
USDS holders will have access to SKY token rewards, built into the Sky Protocol, from the moment it launches. The SKY token rewards will be distributed at 600 million SKY annually, representing a 2.5% inflation to the current circulating supply, across participating USDS holders.
Maker’s Spark lending market subDAOs (now known as Stars) will airdrop 66.66M SPK to participants once the token goes live. Annual subsidies of 1B SPK will be distributed over the following four years to incentivize USDS and Maker token activation programs.
Other key elements of Sky include a new DeFi app, Sky.money, which will provides access to the key features of the Sky Protocol, and the multichain solution Skyline, which will launch and begin connecting USDS, SKY, and other Sky Ecosystem tokens from Ethereum Mainnet to major L2s.
Decentralized stablecoins are facing much regulatory pressure, especially in the US. Dai’s market cap kept declining after hitting an all-time high of around $9.87B in Feb 2022. Now, it stands at only 45.5% of this record. Despite ranking third among all stablecoins by market cap, DAI’s market cap is only 4.5% of USDT and 15.5% of #USDC.
Its founder, Rune Christensen, revealed the intention to upgrade DAI in May of this year. He indicated that there would be two stablecoins, one aimed at regulatory compliance and scale and the other at decentralization ideology. Judging by the announcement, USDS should be the first one. This means it will need to compete with its centralized competitors. PureDai, which should be the second one, will be launched after USDS.

#ChartoftheDay Solana-based memecoin launchpad Pump.Fun hit $100 million in revenue in a record time of merely 217 days since it debuted in January, according to data from Dune Analytics. This makes it the fastest-growing dapp by revenue growth in the crypto ecosystem.
Currently, over 1 million tokens are deployed on Pump.Fun. Despite the recent cooling of the market, Pump.Fun’s ecosystem and revenue have taken off since this May.
Amid retail traders’ dislikes for VC coins with high FDV and low float, memecoins that distribute the entire available supply at launch became favored. Against this backdrop, leveraging Solana’s high TPS and low fees, Pump.Fun quickly rose to prominence.
Although many copycat projects were churned out, Pump.Fun has always controlled the majority of market shares. Leading Solana DEX Raydium also benefited greatly from handling tokens migrated from Pump.Fun.
Recently, the rise of memecoins on the Tron ecosystem has partially directed away the attention and the associated liquidity, but Pump.Fun has maintained a positive daily revenue of over $300,000 every day.
Nevertheless, as Pump.Fun rose because of the meme coin fever, considering the short-lived nature of most meme coin projects, whether Pump.Fun’s success will be sustainable depends highly on overall market sentiments and opinions on meme coins.

🔥Top 10 #Crypto #Fundraising Events in the Last Two Weeks (Aug 17-30)
With 56 deals announced in the last two weeks, interest in the primary market is increasing.
1. Story Protocol, invested by a16z crypto, Polychain Capital, Cozomo de'Medici
2. Fabric Cryptography, invested by Blockchain Capital, 1kx network, Inflection.xyz
3. Edge Matrix Chain, invested by Amber Group, Polygon Labs Ventures, Candaq Fintech Group
4. Space and Time, invested by Framework Ventures, Faction VC, Arrington Capital
5. Solayer Labs, invested by Polychain Capital, Binance Labs, Hack VC
6. Gameplay Galaxy, invested by Blockchain Capital, Merit Circle
7. myco.io, invested by DAMANN INVEST, Aptos Labs, MOCHAVentures
8. double jump.tokyo, Inc., invested by SBI Investment, Sony, Bing Ventures
9. BIFinance, invested by Sunfund Fortuna Global Opportunities, Eternal Asia (S) Pte. Ltd., SDM Education Group
10. Skyfire, invested by Circle Ventures, Ripple, Gemini
#AiNarratives #InfrastructureCoins #GamingCoins

#ChartoftheDay PayPal’s US dollar-pegged stablecoin, PayPal USD, has surpassed $1 billion in total market capitalization, according to data from CoinMarketCap. PYUSD’s monthly supply has been growing at a high speed since the start of the third quarter. And its market cap more than doubled from around $423 million at the end of June.
The growth can be partially attributed to its May expansion to the Solana Network. Since then, its issuance on Solana quickly surpassed that on Ethereum.
Compliance with MiCA, the new European regulations regarding stablecoins that came into effect on June 30 with a 60-day compliance period, may also be critical.PYUSD, the 1:1 USD-backed stablecoin issued by PayPal and managed by Paxos Trust Company, is one of the few that has already obtained #MiCA approval, which enabled it to quickly start nibbling away at market share from those that have not yet received it.
While PayPal saw bringing PYUSD to Solana as a strategic move to boost its usage, the number one stablecoin on Solana right now is still USDC. USDC has twice the market cap of PYUSD, and like PYUSD, it is already compliant with MiCA.Nevertheless, #PYUSD is rising as a potential competitor to #USDC, with more projects in the #Solana ecosystem, such as Jupiter and Kamino, starting to integrate PUSD.

#ChartoftheDay According to data on Etherscan, Ethereum’s gas prices have fallen to the lowest level in five years, with the average gas price at 1 gwei for three consecutive days. Earlier this week, gas prices even fell to as low as 0.6 gwei. In response, Etherscan added three decimal points to the gas tracker to capture the current gas price levels accurately.

Since the #Ethereum Dencun update, users have been migrating to faster and cheaper blockchains, such as L2s and Solana, for more economical gas fees. Compared to March, when gas prices stayed at around 83.1 gwei, Ethereum gas prices dropped by over 95%. Lower transaction fees reduce Ether's consumption, resulting in Ether going back to inflation. The net supply increased by about 16,000 $ETH tokens in the past week. The current annual growth rate stands at 0.7%.

If we reference the past cycles, lower Ethereum gas fees typically mean lower user activity on-chain, which is a sign of the market bottoming and could signal ETH's bullish performance afterward. However, despite expectations of inflows from traditional financial institutions to BTC and ETH bitcoins and an upcoming easing cycle from the US Federal Reserve in September, #BTC☀ and #ETH prices are performing poorly, continuing to defy the bullish predictions.

$BTC

#ChartoftheDay According to Crypto.com's latest research, global crypto owners reached about 617 million as of the first half 2024, increasing 6.4% from the end of 2023. Of them, Bitcoin ( BTC$ ) owners and Ethereum ( ETH$ ) owners grew by 5.9% and 9.7% and reached 314 million and 136 million, respectively, with Bitcoin owners accounting for over 50% of the total number of crypto owners.
Despite the ups and downs the crypto market has experienced this year due to factors such as the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs, uncertain macroeconomic conditions, overall liquidity crunch, and the lack of innovative new narratives, it’s good to see increases in BTC and ETH’s adoption. Although such an improvement didn’t bring about apparent price increases for ETH, the approval of ETH spot ETFs allows the cryptocurrency to become a part of traditional financial institutions' asset allocation and risk management.
Some traditional financial institutions, including VanEck, are also exploring the possibility of pushing for the approval of SOL$ spot ETFs. Although facing challenges, including the dispute on SOL’s nature as a security, some critics believe the result of the US presidential election may become a deciding factor.

Top #Crypto #fundraising Events in the Last Two Weeks (Aug 3 to Aug 16)

⚡️The number of deals dropped to 31 from around 50 in the previous periods.

1. Chaos Labs, invested by Haun Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Slow Ventures

2. Sahara Labs, invested by Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, Polychain Capital

3. Andrena, invested by Dragonfly, CMT Digital, Castle Island Ventures

4. Sling Money, invested by Union Square Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Slow Ventures

5. Essential, invested by Archetype, IOSG Ventures, The Spartan Group

6. Parfin, invested by ParaFi Capital, Framework Ventures, L4 Venture Builder

7. Vessel, invested by Sequoia Capital, Avalanche Foundation, Algorand Foundation

8. Rivalz Network, invested by Delphi Ventures, D1 Ventures, Gate Ventures

9. Satflow, invested by Variant, Nascent, UTXO Management

10. Cartridge, invested by BITKRAFT Ventures, Fabric Ventures, StarkWare