Weekly Report | Bitcoin's market value surpasses silver, becoming the 8th largest asset in the world; Dencun upgrade has been activated on the Ethereum mainnet; Review of the third round of funding for social ecosystem projects by Mask Network

Organizer: Elvin, ChainCatcher

"What Important Events Happened This Week (3.11-3.17)"

1. Bitcoin's Market Cap Surpasses Silver, Becoming the 8th Largest Asset Globally
According to ChainCatcher, the latest data from companiesmarketcap shows that as Bitcoin's price surpassed $71,000, its market cap has risen to $1.389 trillion, surpassing silver ($1.381 trillion) and ranking as the eighth largest asset globally.
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2. CryptoQuant CEO: Bitcoin Will Face a Seller Liquidity Crisis, Cycle Peak Price May Exceed Expectations
According to ChainCatcher, based on the analysis by Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of CryptoQuant, the Bitcoin market is in a price discovery phase, but a seller liquidity crisis is imminent. Last week, the net inflow of physical Bitcoin ETFs reached 30,000 BTC. Known entities such as exchanges and miners hold about 3 million BTC, with U.S. entities holding about 1.5 million BTC. At the current rate, a seller liquidity crisis will occur within the next six months.

Ki Young Ju pointed out that once a seller liquidity crisis occurs, due to limited seller liquidity and a thin order book, the next cycle peak price of Bitcoin may exceed expectations. This situation may arise when the total amount of Bitcoin held by accumulation addresses reaches about 3 million BTC.
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3. Polyhedra Network Completes $20 Million Strategic Financing at a $1 Billion Valuation, Led by Polychain Capital
According to ChainCatcher, The Block reported that Polyhedra Network has completed $20 million in strategic financing at a $1 billion valuation, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Animoca Brands, Hashkey Capital, Longhash Ventures, Emirates Consortium, and Mapleblock Capital.

It is understood that this round of financing and the previous four rounds were conducted through future tokens or simple agreements for future tokens (SAFT). This round of financing ended last month, bringing Polyhedra's total financing to $75 million. The funds will be used to hire across functions such as product, engineering, business development, and marketing, expanding the current team of about 50 people to around 80.
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4. Bloomberg: Layer1 Public Chain Berachain Completes $69 Million Financing, Co-led by Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures
According to ChainCatcher, Bloomberg reported that the Layer1 public chain Berachain has secured over $69 million in financing co-led by Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Ventures. The project raised funds by selling digital tokens, with a valuation reaching $1.5 billion. It is currently unclear whether this round of financing has been completed.

Berachain reportedly has three main tokens: BERA, BGT, and the Honey stablecoin. The test version of the blockchain was released to the public in January, but the project has not fully launched.

According to the crypto data platform RootData, in April 2023, Berachain completed $42 million in financing, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from OKX Ventures.
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5. Dencun Upgrade Activated on Ethereum Mainnet
According to ChainCatcher, the Ethereum Dencun upgrade has begun activation on the Ethereum mainnet.

Ethereum Layer 2 rollups will now use the "blob" method instead of "calldata" to publish transactions. Transaction fees for L2 (such as Base, Optimism, Arbitrum One, zkSync, Starknet, etc.) will be significantly reduced.
6. Binance to List Metis Token METIS
According to ChainCatcher, Binance will list the Metis token METIS on March 11 at 20:00, with a seed label.
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7. Solana Ecosystem Project Roaring Groundhog Token $Ahhh Completes IDO of 8,800 SOL
According to ChainCatcher, on March 16 at 4 PM, the highly anticipated $Ahhh within the SOL ecosystem successfully completed an IDO of 8,800 SOL. According to Roaring Groundhog's official Twitter, this IDO raised over 10,000 SOL, with the excess portion to be refunded within 5 working days. All funds raised from the IDO will be invested, and the related liquidity pool will be permanently locked.

$Ahhh will start trading at 1 PM UTC (9 PM Beijing time). It is reported that this IDO follows a fully fair principle, and the project team also purchased tokens through the IDO like everyone else, with no shares reserved for the team. This ensures that all participants, including the project team, enjoy equal fairness and transparency.

Insiders say that Solana officials have also shown interest in this project. Through this IDO, the Roaring Groundhog project aims to deepen its connection with the Solana community and promote the mutual prosperity of the Solana ecosystem.
8. Stephen Chow's NFT Nobody Has Broken Below Issue Price, Falling Over 27% in 7 Days
According to ChainCatcher, data from Blur shows that the NFT project Nobody, in collaboration with Stephen Chow, has fallen below its issue price in less than two months since its launch, with the current floor price reported at 0.1677 ETH, a 7-day drop of 27.09%.
9. DAO Maker: Expanding to Solana Network, Plans to Launch 4 Solana IDO Projects
According to ChainCatcher, DAO Maker announced on social media that it will expand to the Solana network.

Upcoming actions include: adding a $2 million SOL liquidity pool on Raydium; launching 4 Solana IDO projects; and listing YOURAI on Raydium next Tuesday.
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10. Data

• The number of GPU miners on the io.net network has exceeded 51,000
• Short sellers of Microstrategy stocks have lost $3.3 billion this year
• Solana's on-chain DEX trading volume exceeded $3.8 billion on March 17, setting a new record
• The top address holding BOME sold 190 million BOME for 19,640 SOL, making a profit of $3.76 million
• Sun Yuchen's address will receive 3.45 million ETHFI airdrop with 120,000 ETH
• Runestone has completed a total of 112,000 airdrops, with a cumulative trading volume of over 205 BTC
• In February, the total venture capital financing in the blockchain industry was about $852 million
• The total trading volume of NFT lending platform Blend exceeded $5.3 billion
• FTX and Alameda Research deposited 6,500 ETH into Coinbase through 7 transactions in the past half month
• The staking amount on Ethereum's beacon chain has exceeded 31 million ETH

"What Interesting Articles Are Worth Reading This Week (3.11-3.17)"

1. “Nothing Research Partner: Buying High is the Real Bottom Fishing, Insights on This Bull Market”

Insights from a partner at Nothing Research on this bull market.

2. “Upcoming Airdrop, How to Play the Web3 Gaming Platform BlockGames”

Recently, the Web 3 gaming platform BlockGames has gone viral online. The reason is that the project announced social mining for the BLOCK token on March 9 on the X platform, allowing users to accumulate social points by tweeting, reposting, quoting, replying, and liking content related to BLOCK topics to gain eligibility for the BLOCK airdrop.

Previously, everyone should have experienced social point-based projects like Tip, which is backed by the X platform (sharing, liking, commenting, tweeting, blogging, or any other dissemination of content related to Tipcoin helps users accumulate points and obtain TIP). This project achieved its terrifying "viral marketing" through KOL traffic + Web3 token airdrop, using the X platform's relationship network as a traffic entry point to attract users with token airdrop expectations.

Recently, BlockGames has been trending on the X platform, and related content such as likes seems to indicate that this type of social project is rising again.

3. “Blade Games Launches ZK Game Engine: Creating Trustless Games”

This ZK game engine is jointly developed by Blade Games and Delphinus Lab, and this article is co-authored by both parties, aiming to help more web2 game developers and full-chain game developers understand the advantages and development paths of the ZK game engine.

4. “Cancun Upgrade: Initiating the Next Revolution in Ethereum NFTs”

Major blockchain projects do not undergo significant evolution every day. That is why all eyes are on Ethereum right now, as this leading smart contract platform is set for a major upgrade that will introduce an unprecedented mechanism: Blobspace.

The arrival of blobs on Ethereum will usher in the first golden age of L2 scaling solutions, which in turn will spark a revolution in how builders and users handle NFTs.

In today's article, let's quickly review EIP-4844 and blobspace, as well as some key points to pay attention to in the future.

5. “A Comprehensive Comparison of Six Major Liquidity Re-staking Protocols, Which One is Right for You?”

In this bull market, re-staking is expected to become a key narrative, with over ten liquidity re-staking protocols competing for EigenLayer's total locked value of over $11 billion.

This article compares six major liquidity re-staking protocols, aiming to provide readers with an easy-to-understand way to grasp the subtle differences between various liquidity re-staking protocols. Given the numerous trade-offs in different LRT designs, investors should make choices based on their personal preferences.

6. “What Are Projects and Users Busy With During the Cancun Upgrade?”

On March 13 at 21:54, the Cancun upgrade (Cancun-Deneb) will officially activate on the Ethereum mainnet at block height 269568 after dozens of test calls and development network tests. This is the largest upgrade since Ethereum's merge.

This upgrade will introduce the highly anticipated "Proto-Danksharding" new scheme (i.e., EIP-4844 proposal), focusing on addressing Ethereum's scalability issues by introducing a "Blob new data format" that allows large datasets to be stored in a compressed temporary format, reducing the cost of publishing data to the Ethereum mainnet, thereby lowering Layer 2 transaction gas fees and data availability costs, and advancing the progress of the Danksharding sharding plan.

7. “Polygon Bets on ZK Rollup, Can It Win the L2 War Dominated by OP Series?”

As the modular narrative led by Celestia progresses, competition among Ethereum L2s is becoming fierce, with new chains being announced almost every month, as using Celestia as a data availability (DA) layer can significantly reduce transaction costs.

Many projects are considering whether to launch their own L2, as this may help reposition themselves as a chain that could achieve a higher fully diluted value (FDV) in a bull market. Some DeFi projects were among the first to hop on this fast train, aiming to internalize maximum extractable value (MEV) while reducing transaction costs. These include Aevo (transformed from Ribbon Finance), Lyra Finance, and Frax Finance's Fraxtal. Notably, all of the aforementioned projects have chosen Optimistic Rollups (ORU), particularly OP Labs' OP Stack, as their chain instead of ZK Rollup.

8. “Messari Research Report: In-Depth Analysis of Pyth, a Leading Oracle Project on Solana”

Blockchain applications typically use data from the external world. However, the design of these systems limits their ability to interact natively with external data without assistance. Therefore, blockchains rely on oracles to act as intermediaries, aggregating external data and making it available for on-chain applications.

Typically, oracle networks incentivize nodes to seek specific information, reach consensus on the value of specific data points, and publish these values to the blockchain within a set time frame. However, this "push" model can be indirect, costly, and difficult to scale. Pyth Network addresses these issues by cultivating a network of primary source (first-party) data providers and coordinating a "push" model. This model reduces latency, scales quickly, and lowers network costs by shifting update costs to data consumers (applications and developers).

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the oracle project Pyth on Solana.

9. “With the Completion of the Cancun Upgrade, Does the LRT Track Catalyze the Ethereum Ecosystem?”

With the completion of the Cancun upgrade, Ethereum and its related ecosystem tokens have performed well recently. At the same time, modular concept projects and Ethereum Layer 2 projects are successively launching their mainnets, further boosting the current market's optimism about the Ethereum ecosystem. The narrative of liquidity re-staking (Liquid Restaking) has also begun to attract capital attention due to the popularity of the EigenLayer project.

However, is ETH -> LST → LRT a catalyst for the Ethereum ecosystem or, as many say, a nested doll?

This research report elaborates on the ecological situation of the LRT track, detailing the current status, opportunities, and future of the LRT track. Currently, many LRT protocols have not issued tokens, and there is significant homogeneity among projects. However, KelpDAO, Puffer Finance, and Ion Protocol are viewed positively, as these three types of protocols have development paths that are distinctly different from other LRT protocols. The future of the LRT track remains a rapidly growing niche market. Huobi Research Institute predicts that only a few top projects will emerge.

This article was written by the Research team under HTX Ventures. HTX Ventures is the global investment department of Huobi HTX, integrating investment, incubation, and research to identify the best and most promising teams globally.

10. “In-Depth Analysis of the Far-Reaching Impacts of Ethereum's Cancun Upgrade and EIP-4844”

The Ethereum Cancun upgrade has been successfully completed. This article is a transcript of an interview with Uweb founder and former Huobi University president Yu Jianing by renowned analyst Haotian. It discusses the positive impact of the significant reduction in L2 GAS on developers after the upgrade, why it will lead to more severe modularization and thus challenge Ethereum, and the future development prospects of the OP and ZK ecosystems.