ChainCatcher news, the on-chain game engine MagicBlock announced the completion of a $7.5 million seed round financing. This round was led by Faction, a subsidiary of Lightspeed, with participation from institutions such as Maven11, Mechanism Capital, Robot Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Equilibrium, Pivot Global, and angel investors including Solana co-founder Toly.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Binance has initiated a vote to decide whether to delist one of the three tokens: Zcash (ZEC), FTT, or JASMY, which has sparked strong dissatisfaction among privacy coin supporters.Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox, DCG founder Barry Silbert, Ledger CTO, and others have publicly voiced their opposition, emphasizing the importance of privacy rights. ZEC currently has a market capitalization of approximately $500 million, with a price drop of 3.1% in the last 24 hours to $31.26. Privacy coins have long faced regulatory pressure, and the European Union has previously proposed a complete ban on such tokens.

ChainCatcher news, Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino stated on social media, "The market's reaction to 'Tim Apple tariff exemption' is expected to be positive; Nasdaq could surge as the exemption also applies to Nvidia and other large tech companies.Sources indicate that politically, this move further exposes the weak arguments of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ross and U.S. Trade Advisor Navarro—that high tariffs and other restrictions can 'magically' create jobs domestically. If that were the case, why exempt companies that rely most on foreign labor and components?Investors and CEOs generally believe that this tariff plan is one of the worst policy rollouts in recent years. They all agree that we need a new trade mechanism, and the president's criticisms are well-founded. However, it requires further study and thoughtful action, likely after tax cuts and deregulation take effect, yet the results are quite the opposite."

ChainCatcher news, ETH has fallen more than 8% in the past seven days and is currently down nearly 55% from its high of $4000 in December 2024. However, a recent video circulating on social media of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin "meowing" at a robot seems to have sparked dissatisfaction within the crypto community. Several industry insiders have criticized Vitalik Buterin, such as:Cork Protocol co-founder Phil Fogel posted on the X platform, "My professional salary and net worth are largely in the hands of this meowing person." Crypto KOL Wendy O also stated, "The future of Ethereum is in the hands of this meowing person." Crypto trader Scott Crypto Warrior expressed more intense criticism, saying, "Pray for ETH, Vitalik what are you doing? Stop finding rims for robots and give ETH a boost."

ChainCatcher news, according to TechCrunch, Avara, the development company behind Aave, Lens, and Family, has completed a $31 million financing round for the social protocol Lens, led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Avail, AlchemyPlatform, Circle, Consensys, DFG, Fabric Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Superscrypt, Re7Capital, Wintermute Ventures, Caliber Ventures, G-20, Blockchain Coinvestors, Borderless Capital, and Bodhi Ventures.Avara founder Stani Kulechov stated that the Lens v3 version will launch on the mainnet in the first quarter of 2025, utilizing zkSync and validiums technology to reduce transaction costs, aiming to provide infrastructure for decentralized social applications.According to the Web3 asset data platform RootData, Avara was renamed from Aave Companies and is a vibrant collective of pioneering brands in the decentralized finance and social space, including Aave, Lens, GNO, and others.

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, Bitcoin and ZK infrastructure company Fiamma has completed a $4 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Faction and L2IV, with participation from Astera Ventures, Contribution Capital, Sats Ventures, Chapter One, and FoundersHead. The investment also includes participation from major strategic investors in the Bitcoin infrastructure space, such as BOB (Build on Bitcoin), as well as various angel investors including the founders of Satlayer and Daedalus. The company plans to use this investment to expand Fiamma's business, accelerate product development, and drive the adoption of its underlying technology.Fiamma is described as a Bitcoin and ZK infrastructure company dedicated to transforming Bitcoin into a dynamically programmable asset. It is unlocking real use cases for Bitcoin, turning it into a dynamic asset and the foundation for decentralized internet and financial systems. Fiamma's products include the Bitcoin bridge Fiamma Bridge and the Bitcoin ZK verification layer Fiamma Layer powered by BitVM2.

ChainCatcher news, according to DLNews, as the price of Bitcoin approaches $100,000 this year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams expressed satisfaction with his cryptocurrency salary decision. "Remember when I first got my Bitcoin salary and you all laughed at me? Now who’s laughing?" he said at a press conference on Tuesday.When he took office in January 2022, Adams converted about $30,000 of his salary for the first three months into Bitcoin and Ethereum. According to the latest financial disclosure statement, as of the end of 2023, the value of his Bitcoin holdings is between $5,000 and $54,999.In addition to Adams, Miami Mayor Suarez and Belgian MP De Beukelaer have also chosen to receive their salaries in Bitcoin.

ChainCatcher news, Coinbase stated that the Celo L1 blockchain (Coinbase code: CGLD) will migrate to Celo L2 on January 16, 2025. Coinbase will not support the migration, and customers must withdraw CGLD from Coinbase by January 13, 2025, to prevent their funds from becoming inaccessible.This move has sparked dissatisfaction within the community. cLabs CEO Marek Olszewski stated, "This feels like a hindrance to the Ethereum-centric Layer 2 scaling roadmap. Has the hard fork caused controversy? How should the Celo community respond? Celo Layer 1 validators can choose to retain the current Layer 1 chain and rename it to Celo Gold (CGLD) to make life easier for Coinbase and its users. Fortunately, Coinbase is already using this code, so CGLD could become a Memecoin."

ChainCatcher news, according to NBC News reports, two insiders revealed that since Election Day, Musk has been frequently appearing at Trump's home in Palm Beach, Florida—Mar-a-Lago, where he has been almost constantly with Trump, participating in calls and meetings. He continuously expresses his views on Trump's second term, even crossing some boundaries with Trump's transition team, giving the impression of "staying too long."These two insiders indicated that Musk's frequent appearances have begun to irritate some members of Trump's inner circle, who entered Trump's circle earlier than Musk and feel that he is overstepping during the transition. One of the individuals stated, "He acts like a 'co-president' and spares no effort to let everyone know it. He has been taking credit for Trump's victory, boasting about America PAC and X to anyone willing to listen, trying to make Trump feel indebted to him, while Trump never owes anyone a favor."Insiders revealed that some of Trump's advisors are concerned that Musk does not understand that a key to functioning in Trump's world is to maintain a low profile, and Musk's involvement is too aggressive, which could undermine his position in the long run. The second insider also stated that Musk seems to be pushing his own agenda rather than focusing on Trump's agenda.

ChainCatcher news, according to NBC News, two insiders revealed that since Election Day, Musk has been frequently appearing at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where he has been almost constantly with Trump, participating in calls and meetings. He continuously expresses his views on Trump's second term, even crossing some boundaries of Trump's transition team, giving the impression that he seems to be "staying longer than necessary."These two insiders indicated that Musk's frequent appearances have begun to irritate some members of Trump's inner circle, who entered Trump's circle earlier than Musk and feel that he is overstepping during the transition. One of the individuals stated, "He acts like a 'co-president' and spares no effort to let everyone know it. He has been taking credit for Trump's victory, boasting about America PAC and X to anyone willing to listen, trying to make Trump feel indebted to him, while Trump owes no one any favors."Insiders revealed that some of Trump's advisors are concerned that Musk does not understand that a key to functioning in Trump's world is to maintain a low profile, and Musk's involvement is too aggressive, which could harm his standing in the long run. The second insider also noted that Musk seems to be pushing his own agenda rather than focusing on Trump's agenda.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, Layer1 blockchain developer Pharos has completed a $8 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Faction and Hack VC, with SNZ Capital participating as a strategic investor. Other investors include Dispersion Capital, Hash Global, Generative Ventures, MH Ventures, Zion, and Chorus One.According to RootData, Pharos is an ultra-fast, EVM-compatible internet-level blockchain that enhances payments and applications through trustlessness and decentralization.

ChainCatcher news, Scroll announced that 15% of the total token supply will be allocated for future airdrops, with 7% to be distributed on October 22. However, users expressed disappointment over the decision to allocate 5.5% to Binance Launchpool, considering this allocation unfair.Although Scroll stated that Binance can help achieve global distribution, many users questioned this strategy, believing it favors large investors. The total supply of SCR is 1 billion tokens, and users are hoping for a fairer distribution mechanism to reflect their contributions and efforts.

ChainCatcher news, after the announcement of the Catizen airdrop allocation information, some players expressed dissatisfaction with the changes to the token distribution model and allocation standards that were not communicated. Developer Pluto Studio admitted that they did not disclose the changes in standards in advance. After the CATI airdrop interface opened, several players expressed disappointment on X, as the rewards they received were lower than expected.In addition, the Catizen team had previously stated that the vKitty income rate in the game would be the main determining factor for airdrop allocation. However, earlier last Sunday, after revealing the airdrop allocation to players, Pluto stated that it had actually changed the design of the airdrop upon discovering that some players were artificially increasing their income. It stated: "During the review of the data for this CATI airdrop, we found that many bot accounts were exploiting this public rule by using scripts to increase their vKitty profit rate, attempting to obtain a large amount of CATI tokens.In this case, adhering to the original airdrop standards would severely harm the interests of genuine players and community supporters. Therefore, the airdrop standards were adjusted to minimize the vKitty profit rate, focusing instead on 'factors that more accurately reflect real player activity, such as: on-chain interactions, task completions, fish coin purchases, and consumption.'" Decrypt sought comment from Pluto Studio, including why it did not ban cheating players but instead changed the standards for all users, but did not receive an immediate response.

ChainCatcher news: Web3 oracle provider Stork Network has completed a $4 million seed round financing, led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Lattice, CMS, and Wintermute.Stork Labs, the core contributor to Stork Network, is developing the Open Data Market, a tool that connects data publishers with protocols, decentralized applications, and other data consumers through composite oracle services. Stork Perps is the company's first COS product.

According to ChainCatcher news, the open AI cloud service provider Hyperbolic has completed a $7 million seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital and Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Chapter One, LongHash, Bankless Ventures, Republic Digital, Nomad Capital, CoinSummer Labs, and Third Earth Capital. The funds will be used to advance the development of Hyperbolic's open AI cloud platform, including hiring key engineers and creating a supportive ecosystem for developers.Hyperbolic plans to integrate global GPU computing resources and leverage blockchain technology to provide verifiable and secure AI services, addressing the industry's bottleneck issues related to the cost and allocation of computing resources. Hyperbolic's first product is an AI inference service that promises high performance at a lower cost. Its innovative approach utilizes "heterogeneous computing" technology to optimize tensor operations across various hardware, allowing developers to access powerful open-source AI models through simple API calls. Additionally, Hyperbolic is building a GPU marketplace that offers an intuitive and automated interface for users to rent and supply GPUs, supported by its decentralized orchestration layer Hyper-dOS (Hyperbolic Distributed Operating System).

ChainCatcher news, the Web3 asset data platform RootData published on platform X, based on 1,200 valid survey results from airdrop users, found that the participant group in the airdrop market is mainly part-time retail investors, with most users participating in airdrops for 1 - 6 months. Retail investors primarily rely on the investment and financing information portal RootData as well as social platforms like X and Telegram to obtain airdrop information. Additionally, due to fraudulent activities in airdrop interactions, some users have suffered losses, with 59.5% of users losing less than $100, and the maximum loss reaching $37,000.Moreover, user satisfaction with airdrop projects varies, with 90% of users believing that Uniswap and Arbitrum projects have the highest satisfaction in airdrops, followed closely by Aptos and Sei Network; while 96.1% of users consider zkSync to be the least satisfactory project, followed by LayerZero and PolyHedra. According to the analysis, a long-term task system and airdrop values that do not meet expectations may be the main reasons for user dissatisfaction with airdrops.

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, zkSync developer Matter Labs has filed trademark applications for "ZK" in 9 countries, claiming that the term "zero knowledge" is the company's exclusive intellectual property. This move has sparked widespread discontent in the crypto industry.In response, industry leaders including Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and Brendan Farmer, StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, Polyhedra Network co-founder and zkBridge inventor Tiancheng Xie, as well as Turing Award winner and co-inventor of ZK-proofs Shafi Goldwasser, signed an open letter calling for Matter Labs to withdraw the trademark application, stating that it is an "oppressive act."StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson directly stated that Matter Labs' attempt to trademark ZK technology is an "absurd act of intellectual property hijacking."Currently, Matter Labs has not responded to this matter.

ChainCatcher news, according to FORTUNE, the Web3 weather network WeatherXM Network announced the completion of a $7.7 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Protocol Labs, Borderless Capital, Arca, Alumni Ventures, Placeholder VC, Red Beard Ventures, Metaplanet, GS Futures, Consensys Mesh, Westerly Ventures, dlab, Eleftherios Diakomichalis, and Juan Benet.It is reported that the company plans to use this investment to develop its team and network, and continue research and development in supporting crypto-enabled weather hardware and decentralized infrastructure. WeatherXM has deployed over 5,000 stations in more than 80 countries/regions, producing various weather station hardware devices that collect local environmental data, collaboratively building a unique ground sensor weather network.According to the Web3 asset data platform RootData, Weather XM is a Web3 weather network that uses crypto incentives to improve the accuracy of forecasts. Weather XM's personal weather stations allow owners to become weather station operators and earn rewards by collecting and verifying data.