Evening News | Sui developer Mysten Labs completes $300 million financing; Animoca Brands completes $110 million financing

Organizer: Runsheng, Chain Catcher

"What important events have occurred in the past 24 hours"

1. Sui developer Mysten Labs completes $300 million financing, led by FTX Ventures

According to The Wall Street Journal, Sui developer Mysten Labs has completed $300 million in financing, led by FTX Ventures, with participation from a16z Crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bixin Ventures, and A&T Capital.

In July 2022, The Information reported that sources said the Web3 startup Mysten Labs was negotiating a Series B financing of at least $200 million at a valuation of $2 billion, with investors led by FTX Ventures having already committed at least $140 million to this round. (Source link)

2. Animoca Brands announces completion of $110 million financing, with participation from Temasek, Boyu Capital, and others

NFT development and investment company Animoca Brands announced the completion of $110 million in financing, with participation from Temasek, Boyu Capital, and GGV Capital. This round of financing was conducted through the issuance of convertible notes, which have a maturity date of three years from the date of issuance and can be converted at any time before that date at the option of the noteholders.

Animoca stated that it will use the new funds to continue financing strategic acquisitions, investments, and product development, obtain licenses for popular intellectual properties, and advance the "open virtual world," including efforts to promote digital property rights for online users.

It is reported that Animoca Brands has raised over $600 million to date. Previously, at the end of August, Bloomberg reported that Temasek would lead a new round of financing of $100 million for Animoca Brands through convertible bonds. (Source link)

3. Binance launches its soul-bound token BAB on BNB Chain
Binance officially launched the Binance Account Bound token (BAB) at 17:00 (UTC) on September 8, which serves as a soul-bound token for Binance users who have completed KYC verification. Users will be able to mint BAB tokens on the BNB Chain as proof of identity and participate in building multiple projects to earn rewards.

It is reported that the token is non-transferable but can be revoked, and a single Binance user ID can only mint one BAB token on a specific chain. (Source link)

4. BNB Chain to launch zkBNB mainnet zero-knowledge proof scaling solution by year-end

BNB Chain stated in an official blog that it launched the zkBNB testnet based on zero-knowledge proof on September 2, allowing developers to start building applications, with plans to launch the mainnet by the end of the year. BNB Chain claims that zkBNB aims to provide faster transaction speeds, quicker finality, and lower gas fees, marking a significant breakthrough for BNB Chain's scalability.

According to the introduction, zkBNB features include: support for rapid integration of payments and atomic swaps, leveraging innovative built-in AMM exchanges and liquidity pools for DeFi use cases, automatic trading of digital assets without permission; TPS reaching 5000-10000; built-in NFT marketplace and API services; built-in domain name services, etc. (Source link)

5. Web3 data infrastructure provider Spice AI completes $13.5 million seed round financing, led by Madrona

According to GeekWire, Web3 data infrastructure provider Spice AI has completed $13.5 million in seed round financing, led by Madrona, with participation from Blackbird Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, and Founders' Co-op, as well as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, current GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, and Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich.

It is reported that Spice AI is building a foundational platform for Web3, allowing developers to avoid building their own infrastructure and dealing with complex and costly data engineering. Spice AI can index data from mainstream blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, then store and distribute this data on the platform and allow customers to access it. (Source link)

"What are some interesting articles worth reading in the past 24 hours"

1. “Development of Smart Contracts: A Comparative Study of Move and Rust”

Recently, discussions about Aptos and Sui have been heating up, as both are emerging high-performance L1 public chains, and the Move smart contract programming language is an essential component of these new chains. Some developers are actively turning to Move, claiming it is the future of smart contract development. Others are more cautious, believing that Move does not offer much that is new compared to existing programming languages.

The author of this article conducts an in-depth technical exploration of Move, its novel programming model, the Sui blockchain and how it leverages Move's capabilities, as well as a comparison with Solana and its programming model. To highlight the characteristics of Move, this article compares Solana/Rust with Sui/Move.

2. “Interpreting the NFT Royalty Dispute from Economic Principles”

The royalty war sparked by Sudoswap has not yet come to an end. During the bull market, the FOMO sentiment was all about how much to multiply investments, with no one caring about the small royalties, which were originally promoted as an advantage of NFT collectibles. However, in the bear market, trading platforms have turned their attention to royalties to compete for a market that has become very low in activity, and it has indeed been effective.

This article explains the impact of NFT royalties on the market from the perspective of economic principles, serving as a popular science article about the market itself. The author hopes to dilute the debates that carry a smallholder mentality and planned economy biases and believes that whether to cancel royalties should be judged by the market, not by morality.

3. “A Brief History of Ethereum: The Billion-Dollar Giant Born from Blizzard's Nerfing of Warlocks”

In November 2013, nearly five years after the creation of the Bitcoin genesis block, the Ethereum white paper was released. After nearly nine years of development, Ethereum is about to undergo a merger upgrade. This upgrade will be the first official use of the Ethereum difficulty bomb after multiple delays, marking the formal farewell of Ethereum's consensus mechanism to PoW and transitioning to PoS, with block rewards expected to drop by about 90%. If the Ethereum burn rate from last year continues, Ethereum will become a deflationary asset.

After transitioning to PoS, Ethereum has laid the groundwork for sharding. What kind of decentralized network will Ethereum become in the future? What phenomenal applications will emerge on it? Will currently popular concepts like DAOs and social applications ignite the next bull market? Perhaps revisiting the history of Ethereum's development can provide some insights.