Daily Report | Citi's Global Head of Digital Assets has left; Ethereum ranks 37th in market capitalization; Musk proposes Trump establish a supervisory committee during his second term
August 13 News OverviewOrganizer: Luan Peng, ChainCatcher
Important News:
- Matrixport: Ethereum's volatility has surpassed Bitcoin's
- Data: 6 Hong Kong virtual asset ETFs traded over 17.06 million HKD today
- Citi's global head of digital assets Shobhit Maini has left the company
- Musk proposes Trump establish a supervisory committee in his second term to ensure fiscal efficiency
- Foreign media: Musk will mobilize 800,000 swing state voters to vote for Trump, providing about 160 million USD in funding support
- Saga announces the launch of its liquidity integration layer to address liquidity fragmentation in the blockchain space
- Canadian crypto exchange ezBtc and its founder misappropriated 9.5 million USD of customer funds for gambling
- Data: Ethereum's market cap is approximately 317.8 billion USD, ranking 37th in asset market cap
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Matrixport: Ethereum's volatility has surpassed Bitcoin's
Matrixport released its latest insights, stating that the 30-day realized volatility difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin has remained between 1.0 and 1.5, indicating that during peak volatility, Ethereum's volatility is 50% higher than Bitcoin's.
Due to Ethereum's poor performance since this bull market began, its high volatility has diminished its appeal to investors. However, as long as the volatility difference remains in this range, buying Ethereum volatility at low levels may be an attractive opportunity.
Data: 6 Hong Kong virtual asset ETFs traded over 17.06 million HKD today
According to Hong Kong stock market data, as of the market close, the trading volume of 6 Hong Kong virtual asset ETFs today was 17.06 million HKD.
Among them:
The trading volume of Huaxia Bitcoin ETF (3042.HK) was 3.364 million HKD;
The trading volume of Huaxia Ethereum ETF (3046.HK) was 5.3527 million HKD;
The trading volume of Harvest Bitcoin ETF (3439.HK) was 1.5167 million HKD;
The trading volume of Harvest Ethereum ETF (3179.HK) was 3.474 million HKD;
The trading volume of Bosera HashKey Bitcoin ETF (3008.HK) was 2.0842 million HKD;
The trading volume of Bosera HashKey Ethereum ETF (3009.HK) was 1.2666 million HKD.
Citi's global head of digital assets Shobhit Maini has left the company
According to Bloomberg, Shobhit Maini, the global head of digital assets at Citi's markets division, has left the company.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Maini had been with Citi for over 14 years, most recently serving as the head of the digital assets team within Citi's markets division. A memo released last week by Citi's head of market innovation and investment, Lee Smallwood, indicated that Maini's departure was to "seek entrepreneurial opportunities in the digital asset space."
Deepak Mehra, Citi's global head of market strategy investment, will succeed Maini as the global head of digital assets.
Musk proposes Trump establish a supervisory committee in his second term to ensure fiscal efficiency
Musk mentioned in a conversation with Trump that he called for Trump to establish a government committee in his second term to ensure taxpayers' money is used effectively, expressing his willingness to assist such a committee. Trump praised the idea.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk's team proposed to mobilize 800,000 swing state voters to vote for Trump, providing about 160 million USD (approximately 1.15 billion RMB) in funding support. Reports indicate that during weekly meetings, advisors and vendors from the super PAC update Musk on their latest progress, aiming to mobilize 800,000 voters in swing states to support Trump.
Insiders revealed that they proposed a budget of about 160 million USD (approximately 1.15 billion RMB) needed to complete this task, most of which will come from Musk himself. They also discussed forming a "team" of over 6,000 canvassers and other staff.
The L1 protocol Saga announced on X the launch of its liquidity integration layer to address liquidity fragmentation in the blockchain space.
Saga's liquidity integration layer will introduce automatic composability into the Saga ecosystem. When developers launch a brand new small chain, it will automatically connect to LIL. Through LIL, this new small chain will have immediate access to other small chains as well as tokens, services, and applications from ecosystems outside of Saga.
According to Cointelegraph, Canadian cryptocurrency exchange ezBtc and its founder David Smillie misappropriated approximately 13 million CAD (about 9.5 million USD) of customer cryptocurrency assets and used these funds for gambling, deceiving customers.
The ezBtc platform permanently closed around September 2019 and was dissolved in 2022, claiming to store all users' crypto investments in cold wallets. During its operation from 2016 to 2019, ezBtc accumulated over 2,300 Bitcoins and more than 600 ETH from crypto investors.
According to the BCSC group, Smillie used nearly one-third of user funds for gambling and personal use. ezBtc transferred a total of 935.46 Bitcoins and 159 Ethereum to Smillie's exchange accounts or to CloudBet and FortuneJack. Transfers to these two gambling sites were sometimes made directly from ezBtc and sometimes indirectly from ezBtc to Smillie's exchange account before being transferred to the gambling sites.
Data: Ethereum's market cap is approximately 317.8 billion USD, ranking 37th in asset market cap
According to the latest data from 8marketcap, Ethereum's market cap is approximately 317.8 billion USD, ranking 37th in asset market cap; Bank of America has a market cap of approximately 296.1 billion USD, ranking 38th.
Report: Q2 cryptocurrency venture capital funding grew by 2.5%, while the number of deals decreased by 12.5%
According to a new quarterly report from PitchBook, cryptocurrency financing grew by 2.5%, reaching 2.7 billion USD. Despite the increase in amount, the number of deals decreased by 12.5%.
PitchBook senior analyst Robert Le stated, "Investors are concentrating capital on a narrower range of opportunities, marking a leap towards quality. A few years ago, their investments were more dispersed across various sectors. Overall financing in 2024 is expected to grow by 20% or more compared to last year, reaching 12 to 14 billion USD, while last year was about 10 billion USD."
According to Bloomberg, the liquidators of the bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital are seeking at least 1.3 billion USD in damages from TerraForm Labs to compensate for the losses the fund suffered after the collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna tokens in 2022. The liquidators stated in court documents that before the collapse of these tokens, TerraForm had induced Three Arrows to purchase Luna and TerraUSD by manipulating the market and artificially inflating the prices of these assets. The collapse of the tokens not only wiped out Three Arrows' investments in these tokens but also caused significant losses in other investments.
The liquidators stated that Three Arrows Capital purchased 190 million USD worth of Luna in January 2022. A few months later, a massive sell-off of TerraUSD led to a significant devaluation of Luna. Court documents show that as of the end of April 2022, Three Arrows held Luna worth approximately 462 million USD, but by May 14, the value of its holdings plummeted to just over 2,700 USD. Meanwhile, the net worth of Three Arrows' other digital assets shrank by approximately 858 million USD.
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Ecological projects have raised over 10 million USD, what early opportunities does Monad have?
On July 25, the Monad ecological project announced three rounds of financing exceeding one million USD.
Among them, the MEV infrastructure and liquidity staking platform aPriori secured 8 million USD in seed funding led by Pantera Capital, reportedly valuing aPriori tokens at at least 100 million USD; the liquidity staking protocol Kintsu completed 4 million USD in financing; and the on-chain order platform Kuru received 2 million USD in funding led by Electric Capital.
The investment lineup for this Monad ecological project is very luxurious, with not only star investment institutions like Pantera and Electric but also many well-known figures in the industry, such as Marin Tvrdic from Lido and the founder of Wormhole.
Since Monad completed a 225 million USD financing at a valuation of 3 billion USD in April this year, the recent announcements of top capital support for ecological projects have further increased its network's popularity.
Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong stated on social media that one difference with Monad is that many public chains have strong backing from their own investors, but the applications built on them have not made much of an impact. Monad, on the other hand, has applications under construction that have also received investment from well-known institutions, such as Kintsu, Kuru, Monad Pad, and aPriori.
With the testnet launch approaching, the Monad ecosystem has become a new opportunity for profit in the crypto community.
Behind the frequent CEO changes, Starknet is mired in a trust crisis
Last week, the Starknet Foundation announced a change in CEO, with Diego Oliva, who had served as CEO since March 2023, stepping down and James Strudwick, responsible for Starknet ecosystem growth, taking over.
This is not the first significant executive change for the Starknet team this year. In January, StarkWare CEO Uri Kolodny posted on X that he had resigned due to family health reasons, and the CEO position was taken over by Eli Ben-Sasson, another co-founder and president of StarkWare.
Since facing community backlash over airdrop allocation issues at the beginning of the year, Starknet has not been free from controversy. Recently, ZKX, a leading derivatives protocol in its ecosystem, announced its shutdown less than two months after its TGE, and Starknet Foundation members' defense of ZKX was also met with dissatisfaction from investors.
Frequent CEO changes, coupled with Starknet's "inaction" after multiple public relations crises, have led community users to question the operational status of the organization behind it.
Musk and Trump's peak dialogue: assassination attempts, illegal immigration, Biden's withdrawal
August 13, 2024, is a day that can be recorded in Twitter history—Trump and Musk appeared together on Twitter Space, reportedly with over 1 million participants in the event. However, the dialogue between the two did not start smoothly, encountering a small hiccup—Twitter seemed to face technical issues, with users reporting difficulties accessing the event. X platform data showed that 2 million people were watching the live interview between Trump and Musk but could not see the live details. In response, Musk tweeted that "X seems to have suffered a massive DDOS attack," referring to a distributed denial-of-service network attack, and stated, "We conducted a test of the system with 8 million simultaneous listeners earlier today."
However, the flaws did not overshadow the content, as the two discussed topics such as the assassination attempts Trump faced, illegal immigration, Biden's withdrawal from the race, Harris's refusal to give interviews, the desire to abolish the Department of Education, criticism of the California governor, and electric vehicle policies.
The content of the peak dialogue between the two giants is compiled below for readers.
The Web3 growth ecosystem seems inevitable—Web3 companies need to gain deep insights into users, engage deeply, and attract new users. Today, over 160 companies are building the future of this emerging digital media industry, with 101 startups collectively raising nearly 1 billion USD.
This report delves into this rapidly evolving industry, providing a comprehensive overview of the most promising Web3 growth companies. It includes publicly announced and privately shared financing data, offering a detailed snapshot of the industry today.
In many ways, the Web3 growth industry parallels the rise and fall of digital marketing in the 2010s. The MarTech field has expanded dramatically, from 150 companies in 2011 to over 14,000 by 2024.
A recap of the top 10 centralized exchange hacking incidents in history
In recent years, centralized exchanges (CEX) like Mt. Gox and WazirX have suffered significant losses due to external hacking attacks, while other exchanges like FTX have collapsed due to internal fund misuse. Even industry giants like Binance and Coinbase face existential threats from the world's most powerful financial regulators.
Decentralized exchanges (DEX) can effectively defend against these three major threats—hacking, fraud, and regulatory overreach—that have long plagued CEX. Of course, besides "hacking," there are other threats. For example, the collapse of FTX involved mismanagement and misuse of customer funds by its executives, a situation that is less feasible on DEX due to their inherent structure promoting transparency and user control.
This article explores the largest vulnerabilities in the history of top centralized exchange hacks, from notorious intrusion incidents to systemic vulnerabilities, the cryptocurrency world has experienced turmoil. Here, we review the 10 most severe hacking incidents in centralized exchanges' history.
