Today's Headlines:

Trump announces he is accepting cryptocurrency donations for his U.S. presidential campaign

Bloomberg: Musk's xAI to complete financing this week, valued at $18 billion

Uniswap founder calls for stopping premature high valuations: Crypto projects need to prove value before talking about unicorns

friend.tech: Will start returning 2/3 of the protocol fees in Club Key exchange transactions to APP users in the next few days

Vitalik discusses the importance and implementation of introducing a multi-dimensional Gas pricing mechanism in Ethereum

Puffer Finance announces the official launch of its mainnet

Crypto trading platform Arbelos completes $28 million financing, led by Dragonfly

Bitcoin mining difficulty drops by 5.63% to 83.15T, expected to decrease next time

Regulatory News

The U.S. House of Representatives passes resolution aimed at overturning SEC's crypto custody accounting policy

According to The Block, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a resolution aimed at overturning the SEC's announcement on cryptocurrency custody accounting standards. The vote was 228-182, with majority Republicans in support and 21 Democrats voting in favor. The announcement was first issued in 2022 and has sparked controversy over the past year. It requires cryptocurrency custodians to record customer-held cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets as liabilities. The crypto industry is concerned that this move may hinder banks from safeguarding digital assets. It is currently unclear whether this resolution will become law. However, the White House released a "government policy statement" on Wednesday, stating that President Biden will veto the resolution. The White House stated, "Limiting the SEC's ability to maintain a comprehensive and effective financial regulatory framework for crypto assets will bring serious financial instability and market uncertainty." The resolution may be submitted to the Senate Banking Committee and then voted on by all Senate members.

Trump announces he is accepting cryptocurrency donations for his U.S. presidential campaign

According to Watcher.Guru, Donald Trump announced that he is accepting cryptocurrency donations in his bid for the U.S. presidency. Trump said, "Biden doesn't even know what cryptocurrency is. If you like cryptocurrency, you better vote for Trump." Trump also pledged to end America's hostility towards cryptocurrency and embrace it.

Later in the day, influenced by Trump's remarks, the meme coin named after him, TRUMP, surged over 26% in 24 hours.

New regulations in Taiwan's Anti-Money Laundering Act: Unregistered virtual asset service providers face up to 2 years in prison

According to Ab Media, Taiwan recently passed a new regulation called the "Anti-Scam New Fourth Law," aimed at further strengthening the fight against fraudulent activities and strictly regulating anti-money laundering measures. This set of laws includes the Anti-Fraud Crime Prevention Act, the Anti-Money Laundering Act, the Technology Investigation and Protection Act, and the Communication Protection and Supervision Act, aiming to enhance the government's ability to prevent various criminal activities. The amendment to the Anti-Money Laundering Act specifically targets virtual asset service providers and includes three main amendments. First, any virtual asset service provider that fails to complete anti-money laundering registration may face up to 2 years in prison. Secondly, the law also introduces special money laundering crime modes, targeting the use of virtual asset accounts and third-party payment accounts as money laundering tools, with penalties ranging from 6 months to 5 years in prison and a maximum fine of NT$50 million.

AI

Bloomberg: Musk's xAI to complete financing this week at a valuation of $18 billion

According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is set to complete its latest round of financing this week, with a valuation of around $18 billion, with Sequoia being one of the potential investors. Bloomberg reported last week that xAI is expected to raise $6 billion in the new round of financing (currently about 43.38 billion RMB), initially estimated at $3 billion, but due to the subsequent participation of a large number of investors, the valuation has skyrocketed. Earlier, sources told Bloomberg that Musk's close associates in Sequoia Capital and Future Ventures, as well as other undisclosed investors, are joining this financing battle. The new round of financing will help xAI gain more AI computing resources to compete with openAI and Anthropic: Musk recently stated that xAI's next-generation Grok model is being trained on 20,000 Nvidia H100s, and the future Grok 3 will require up to 100,000 AI GPUs.

Project Updates

Grayscale CEO: Company to focus on spot Ethereum products

According to DL News, Grayscale Investments CEO Michael Sonnenshein stated at an event hosted by the Financial Times in London on Wednesday that the company will focus on converting its Ethereum Trust Fund into spot ETF products; the company is withdrawing applications as many futures products are already available to investors; sometimes we apply for products, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will enter the market. Sonnenshein said that while it is difficult to know the U.S. SEC's view on Ethereum, Grayscale "optimistically believes that the SEC will make the right decision for investors." He added, "Grayscale Ethereum Trust is already a company that submits reports to the SEC. We submit 10-Ks and 10-Qs (disclosure documents to the SEC), and we have always been a company that pushes for regulators to further include cryptocurrencies in their regulatory scope." Earlier yesterday, Grayscale withdrew its Ethereum futures ETF application from the U.S. SEC.

Uniswap founder calls for stopping premature high valuations: Crypto projects need to prove value before talking about unicorns

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams wrote on X platform that cryptocurrency founders and venture capitalists need to stop valuing projects at over $1 billion in the early stages of development and before tokens are released until they truly deserve that valuation. Building something worth 7-9 figures is an incredible achievement, not every project needs to be a unicorn right at the start. Hayden Adams also said, "Perhaps a bit naive, but I think funding as a founder at a fair valuation (real talent wants upside), and investing as a VC at a fair valuation (LPs want upside) can make more money. It's just harder to do it this way."

friend.tech: Will start returning 2/3 of the protocol fees in Club Key exchange transactions to APP users in the next few days

Decentralized social media platform friend.tech announced on X platform that in the coming days, it will start returning 2/3 of the protocol fees in Club Key exchange transactions to APP users. 0.5% of each exchange transaction value will go to the Club chairman, and exchange traders will collectively pay 0.5% less. This announcement was made in advance to give users time to reconsider their votes. This change will use the referral fee feature in the Clubs contract. Other clients will be able to decide where the referral fee for each transaction goes.

ZeroLend: Airdrop claim range expanded to wallets with at least 1 earlyZERO

Decentralized multi-chain lending protocol ZeroLend announced on X platform that over 450,000 wallets have been uploaded to the airdrop claim website. Previously, at least 20,000 earlyZERO tokens were required at the snapshot deadline. Now, wallets with at least 1 earlyZERO token have been added to ensure compliance with the 1:1 redemption promise from earlyZERO to ZERO. Most of the airdrop allocations are expected to be officially completed at this point, but there may still be some areas that need to be addressed.

Injective plans to establish Layer-3 network "inEVM" on Arbitrum

According to CoinDesk, Injective Labs announced plans to launch its independent Layer-3 network "inEVM" on top of Arbitrum's Layer-2 technology. The network will connect the Ethereum, Cosmos, and Solana blockchains, using the Arbitrum Orbit toolkit to enhance interoperability and composability. "inEVM" is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), providing developers with new opportunities to build applications within the Ethereum Layer-2 ecosystem.

Vitalik discusses the importance and implementation of introducing a multi-dimensional Gas pricing mechanism in Ethereum

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published an article titled "Multi-Dimensional Gas Pricing," discussing the importance and feasible paths of introducing a multi-dimensional Gas pricing mechanism in Ethereum. Vitalik pointed out that currently Ethereum simplifies the pricing and limits of all resources into a single dimension of Gas, which, while simplifying market design, also leads to significant efficiency losses. If the network needs to manage n different resources, a single-dimensional Gas could result in throughput losses up to n times. EIP-4844 introduced multi-dimensional pricing for the first time in Ethereum, adding a dedicated Blob data area with independent pricing and limits. This improvement reduced the cost of Rollups by 100 times, increased transaction volume by over 3 times, while the theoretical maximum block size only slightly increased.

The article also discusses the necessity of adopting multi-dimensional Gas when introducing storage proofs for stateless clients. Due to quantum security risks in the Verkle tree scheme, the community hopes to switch to Binary Merkle trees and STARK, but their proof generation speed is much slower. By independently pricing and restricting storage access, stability can be ensured while avoiding cost issues caused by raising Gas prices. Additionally, Vitalik proposed two approaches to implementing multi-dimensional Gas pricing: 1. A simpler approach is to set resource limits for each transaction, valuing each transaction's Gas based on the larger of the consumed data and computational resources, as suggested by EIP-7623. 2. The ideal but more complex approach is to establish a dynamic adjustment mechanism for each resource similar to EIP-1559.

Vitalik emphasizes that introducing multi-dimensional Gas pricing is essential for optimizing Ethereum's efficiency and ensuring a fair and stable ecosystem.