ChainCatcher message, the Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer tweeted that its slashing mechanism has gone live on the mainnet, and the protocol committee has completed the upgrade execution.

ChainCatcher news, a16z general partner Ali Yahya tweeted that a16z has made an additional investment of $55 million in the LayerZero token ZRO, with a lock-up period of 3 years. Currently, ZRO is priced at $2.5, up 5.7% in the last 24 hours, with an FDV of $2.5 billion, and a previous high of $7.1.According to data from RootData, a16z previously led a $120 million financing round for LayerZero in April 2023, with a valuation of $3 billion. Earlier, in March 2022, a16z also led a $135 million financing round for LayerZero, with a valuation of $1 billion. (Source link)

ChainCatcher news, according to the official tweet, the Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer announced that the slashing mechanism will go live on the mainnet today (April 17, 2025).

ChainCatcher message indicates that, according to SoSoValue data, the crypto market sector has seen a slight pullback, with the Layer2 sector leading the decline at 3.47%. Within this sector, Celestia (TIA) and Movement (MOVE) dropped 7.38% and 12.28% respectively over the past 24 hours. The SocialFi sector remained relatively strong, rising by 1.08%, with Toncoin (TON) increasing by 1.24%.In other sectors, the Layer1 sector rose by 0.78%, with Solana (SOL) and Hyperliquid (HYPE) increasing by 3.25% and 4.32% respectively; the CeFi sector rose by 0.52%, with LEO Token (LEO) and Bitget token (BGB) increasing by 1.29% and 1.60% respectively; the Meme sector rose by 0.25%, with Fartcoin (FARTCOIN) increasing by 3.80%; the PayFi sector rose by 0.52%, with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ultima (ULTIMA) increasing by 3.45% and 3.91% respectively; the DeFi sector fell by 0.58%, although Raydium (RAY) rose by 3.08%.Additionally, the crypto sector indices reflecting historical market trends show that the ssiSocialFi, ssiMAG7, and ssiCeFi indices rose by 0.75%, 0.48%, and 0.41% respectively over the past 24 hours, with the ssiMAG7 achieving a weekly return rate of 5.26%.

ChainCatcher news, Solana ecosystem payment solution Solayer announced the launch of a non-custodial cryptocurrency debit card, allowing users to spend crypto assets directly without the need to custody funds. The product is made possible through a partnership with Visa, supporting real-time conversion of SOL and SPL tokens to fiat currency settlements while maintaining users' complete control over their private keys.Solayer stated that this move aims to promote the widespread use of cryptocurrency in everyday payment scenarios.

ChainCatcher news, according to official information, the Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer announced that the slashing mechanism will go live on the mainnet on April 17. Active Validator Services (AVS) will be able to build verifiable, trustless applications; at the same time, operators and stakers will need to take responsibility. Slashing is a way for PoS protocol economic penalties to punish a node or a group of nodes for executing strategies that can be proven to differ from the given protocol specifications.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum SVM Layer2 network Eclipse posted on platform X: Grass points have been locked, and the snapshot has been completed.

ChainCatcher news, according to OKX market data, LAYER briefly broke through 2 dollars, reaching a historical high of 2.07 dollars, currently reported at 1.88 dollars, with a 24-hour increase of over 13%.

ChainCatcher message, in response to the statement "The self-updating of Ethereum requires generational/talent replacement. And the next generation needs to be rooted in Ethereum values (such as cypherpunk)," Vitalik Buterin replied on Warpcast: "I actually think that the growth of the application layer is precisely the time when good social philosophy is most needed. To put it another way: suppose C++ was developed by a totalitarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is general-purpose and has little room for bad social philosophy to corrupt it (or for good social philosophy to improve it). Ethereum Layer-1 is not entirely like that: those who do not believe in decentralization will not add light clients, FOCIL, or (good forms of) account abstraction; those who do not care about energy waste will not spend five years migrating to PoS. But in any case, the opcodes of the EVM might be roughly the same. Therefore, Ethereum might be 50% general-purpose. Applications are about 80% specialized. What kind of applications you build largely depends on your ideas about what Ethereum applications (and Ethereum as a whole) will do for the world. Thus, having good ideas on this topic becomes crucial."Additionally, Vitalik listed some applications, considering good applications like Railgun, Farcaster, Polymarket, Signal, and bad ones like Pump.fun, Terra/Luna, FTX. He believes that the differences in application functionality stem from developers holding different beliefs about the goals they want to achieve.

ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, the Layer2 solution OpenZK Network has announced the completion of a $6 million early financing round, with investors including Animoca Brands, Coinstore, Sovereign Trust, and other institutions. This round of financing will be used to support its technology research and development as well as ecosystem construction.It is reported that OpenZK was founded by former Goldman Sachs Asia Pacific Executive President Dave Sandor, and is currently actively negotiating partnerships with multiple institutions to advance its subsequent strategic layout.According to the Web3 asset data platform RootData, OpenZK Network is a second-layer solution based on zk-rollup technology, which can significantly reduce transaction costs and increase throughput, while also introducing a sustainable reward mechanism through native ETH staking, re-staking, and stablecoin staking.

ChainCatcher message, market data shows that LAYER broke through 1.9 USD this morning, currently retreating to 1.81 USD, with a 24H increase of 29.8%, setting a new historical high.

ChainCatcher message, LayerZero posted on platform X stating that USUAL has been launched on Arbitrum. With this deployment, USD0, USD0++, and USUAL can now be transferred 1:1 across chains.

ChainCatcher news, according to official sources, Sei Network DeFi head Larry delivered a keynote speech titled "The Fastest Parallelized EVM Layer 1" at the "OKX Web3 Night" event.Larry stated that Sei is committed to scaling the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), aiming to achieve a throughput of 5 billion gas per second. Through parallel execution, rapid consensus, and optimized storage, Sei has built the highest-performing EVM in history. In the future, the EVM will be rebuilt from scratch, focusing on three main areas: consensus, storage, and execution. The Giga upgrade will further enhance Sei's performance by optimizing the consensus mechanism and increasing network throughput. After the upgrade, Sei's TPS (transactions per second) is expected to double to 10,000 TPS, meeting the needs of enterprise-level large-scale applications.According to Defillama data, Sei Network's TVL has grown by 85% over the past month, ranking first among all public chains. Notably, several high-growth projects have emerged within the Sei ecosystem, such as Yei Finance, Sailor Finance, and Silo. Among them, the leading DeFi protocol Yei Finance is leveraging Sei's high-performance public chain characteristics to create a full-chain liquidity market, integrating multi-chain lending and trading to provide on-chain users with a user experience comparable to CEX.

ChainCatcher news, according to on-chain analyst Ai Yi's monitoring, two smart money addresses accumulated 8.09 million dollars in LAYER from March 1 to March 3. After holding for two weeks, they realized a profit of 3.18 million dollars (with costs of 0.7856 dollars and 0.9559 dollars respectively) by buying low and selling high, but missed out on an additional profit of 2.39 million dollars. The two addresses may belong to the same whale/institution based on their operational methods and timing.

ChainCatcher news, OKX market shows that LAYER has broken through $1.64 to reach a new high, currently reported at $1.625, with a 24-hour increase of 7.2%.

ChainCatcher message, Solayer announced that the LAYER token is now officially launched on Save (formerly Solend), supporting lending and borrowing transactions.