ChainCatcher news, the gamified full-chain liquidity aggregation innovative protocol 0xAstra has announced the successful completion of a $3 million seed round financing. This round of financing has gathered numerous well-known investment institutions and leading projects, including Ace Redpoint, Animoca Brands, Folium Ventures, Skyland Ventures, Orbiter, and Ultiverse.0xAstra injects vitality into full-chain liquidity and stimulates on-chain interaction through its unique gamified strategy. With deep cooperation with leading blockchain ecosystems, 0xAstra offers a richer and smoother cross-chain trading experience, pushing the potential of liquidity aggregation and re-staking to new heights. Since its launch, 0xAstra has connected to dozens of mainstream L1 and L2 networks, and within just over two months, the platform's cumulative trading volume has surpassed $90 million, demonstrating remarkable growth momentum.The 0xAstra team consists of seasoned experts from the cryptocurrency, gaming, and internet sectors, who have successfully launched multiple game products with over a million users and generated millions of dollars in revenue. Through this financing, 0xAstra aims to lead a new wave of innovation in the DeFi space, creating a more vibrant and interactive decentralized financial ecosystem for global users.

ChainCatcher News: A U.S. court dismissed the allegations that basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal was the "controller" of the NFT project Astrals. The court ruled that Shaquille O'Neal participated in the Solana NFT project Astrals as a "seller" rather than a "controller," and granted Shaquille's request, dismissing some of the allegations against him in the unregistered securities class action that began in May 2023.The court dismissed the claims that the legendary basketball player was the "controller" of Astrals, with the plaintiffs alleging that O'Neal exercised "actual power or control" over the project. However, U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno ruled that O'Neal was a successful "seller" who attracted buyers for Astrals products. The judge also denied the defendants' motion to dismiss the allegations that Astrals NFTs and Galaxy tokens are financial securities.Astrals is a Solana-based NFT project featuring 10,000 unique 3D avatars, aimed at promoting investment in a virtual world and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Astralverse. The project also has its own cryptocurrency, Galaxy, which serves as the governance token for the DAO.

ChainCatcher news, Google held its annual developer conference "I/O 2024" early this morning, announcing a brand new AI agent product Project Astra, which can achieve cross-text, audio, and video multimodal real-time reasoning, similar to OpenAI's released GPT4o.It also launched an update for Gemini 1.5 Pro, whose AI model will soon be able to handle more data, along with a new smaller Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model.Additionally, Google released its latest model "Veo" for generating high-definition videos, as well as the highest quality text-to-image model Imagen 3, which promises to deliver realistic images and "less distracting visual artifacts than our previous models."

ChainCatcher news, the Web3 RPG game Astra Nova has completed a $1 million financing round, with participation from Hashgraph Ventures, Oxbull, MoonEdge, Vision, Kanga, Spicy Capital, Equinox, BTS Labs, Sensei Capital, and others.Astra Nova is supported by Immutable and Hedera Hashgraph, and is built on the Unreal Engine 5 game engine. It currently focuses on the Middle East, North Africa, and Asian markets. Its Token Generation Event (TGE) is reportedly planned for the second quarter of 2024.

ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, the first exclusive pre-alpha test of AstrArk, a Web3 game studio under Moonveil Entertainment, has launched on November 16. Players from Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines can participate in the pre-alpha test.

ChainCatcher news, according to Bloomberg, former NBA star Shaquille O'Neal has been sued again for promoting cryptocurrency. The class action lawsuit filed in federal court in Florida accuses O'Neal of promoting the unregistered Astral tokens in violation of securities laws.The lawsuit claims that O'Neal repeatedly promoted Astrals NFT on his various social media accounts, but the value of the related tokens and NFTs subsequently experienced a "sharp decline." (Source link)

ChainCatcher news, the compliance layer protocol Astra Protocol indicates that the investment platform Republic will purchase 10 million Astra Protocol utility tokens ASTRA, approximately 3 million USD. Republic will primarily use these ASTRA tokens as "points" for Astra's KYC compliance platform and Know-Your-Business (KYB) services.It is reported that members of the Astra Protocol advisory board include former Samsung President and Chief Strategy Officer Young Sohn, former White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, and former EU Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan. (source link)