According to Foresight News, Fantom is currently developing the Sonic Open testnet on the X platform. The team is enhancing the testnet with the necessary tools to enable developers to launch DApps on the network. The new developer testnet is expected to be up and running within 24 hours.

According to CryptoPotato, Shiba Inu (SHIB) has experienced a gradual price increase over the past two months, with some analysts predicting a potential rally for the memecoin in the future. There is speculation that the launch of a spot Bitcoin ETF in the USA could positively impact SHIB and other cryptocurrencies, as it might attract significant investment into the market.

Jalaleddin Hatefi, founder and CEO of the memecoin project PawZone, believes that SHIB and PAW could benefit from the potential launch of a spot Bitcoin ETF in the USA. He thinks the possible introduction of such a product would not lead to a 'buy the rumor, sell the news' scenario but allow a 'ton of big money' to flood the cryptocurrency market. Hatefi also predicted that American regulators would approve numerous BTC ETFs, which could pave the way for the launch of other exchange-traded funds with different cryptocurrencies as underlying tokens.

The potential approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF in the USA is highly anticipated by crypto participants and investors, as it could cause an uptrend for the entire sector. Increased accessibility and added legitimacy to the asset and the market as a whole could result from the existence of such a product in the world's largest economy. This would also show that regulators are not against digital currency, possibly triggering rising interest from institutional investors who would be able to enter the ecosystem without having to purchase amounts of the asset itself. Such factors could lead to a BTC rally, and historically, such increases have positively affected numerous alternative coins, meaning Shiba Inu (SHIB) could be among the winners in the future.

Other major elements that might result in a price rally for Shiba Inu are its burning mechanism and the further advancement of its layer-2 blockchain solution, Shibarium. According to Shibburn, the project witnessed a burn rate spike of almost 100% in the past week, resulting in over 17 billion tokens sent to an address that nobody could access. The program aims to reduce the tremendous circulating supply of Shiba Inu and possibly make the asset more scarce and valuable in time. Shibarium has reached numerous milestones lately, with daily transactions on the network in the millions since the beginning of December and total transactions standing just shy of the 200 million mark.

According to Foresight News, Astar Network founder Sota Watanabe has announced on Twitter that the Astar zkEVM mainnet will be launched in early 2024. The Astar Network is a smart contract platform within the Polkadot ecosystem.