ChainCatcher news, according to DL News, Ryan McMillin, the Chief Investment Officer of the crypto fund management company Merkle Tree Capital, stated that meme coins will dive deep into a bull market, and two president-themed meme coins will be actively traded in the coming months, potentially helping Sol reach $400 before the November U.S. elections.He added, "While memes may be a joke and a short-term speculative tool, they are paving the way for other more sustainable use cases, such as the tokenization of real-world assets. As the U.S. Treasury takes action to strengthen the economy, more liquidity will hit the market, thereby supporting the price of Solana, which means investors will have more funds to trade high-risk assets like cryptocurrencies."

ChainCatcher news, the Aptos ecosystem decentralized trading platform Merkle Trade has completed a $2.1 million seed round financing, led by Hashed and Arrington Capital, with participation from Morningstar Ventures, Amber Group, Aptos Labs, Re7 Capital, and Dorahacks. This round of financing will take place after the platform's launch at the end of 2023, and the funds will be used for the protocol's growth plans.According to the RootData page, Merkle Trade is the first gamified perpetual decentralized exchange built on Aptos. The platform aims to become the largest decentralized leverage trading hub, emphasizing user-friendliness and accessibility.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated on Warpcast that the milestone for basic rollup scaling has been achieved, and the next milestone may be verkle trees and history expiry.

ChainCatcher news, according to the Huobi HTX page, Huobi HTX has updated the Merkle tree asset proof data for March 2024. The specific reserve ratios for this update are: USDT 100% (Huobi assets 611,895,890), BTC 101% (Huobi assets 26,196), ETH 102% (Huobi assets 112,481), TRX 103% (Huobi assets 9,717,203,329). Among them, the USDT and ETH data include stUSDT, USDT-T-Bills assets, and BETH, stETH.Currently, the reserve ratios of Huobi HTX are all maintained above 100%, meaning that Huobi wallet assets exceed the total amount of assets held by users, and Huobi HTX has sufficient reserves to ensure the safety of user assets. Huobi HTX will continue to regularly disclose this information to the public, ensuring that users can safely deposit and withdraw their assets anytime and anywhere.

ChainCatcher message, according to SlowMist intelligence, some accounts' NEXT tokens have been claimed to unintended addresses. The SlowMist security team followed up with an analysis and shared a brief summary as follows:Users can claim NEXT tokens through the claimBySignature function of the NEXT Distributor contract. There are two roles involved: the recipient role, which is used to receive the claimed NEXT tokens, and the beneficiary role, which is the address eligible to receive NEXT tokens, determined when the Connext protocol announced the airdrop eligibility.When a user claims NEXT tokens, the contract performs two checks: first, it checks the signature of the beneficiary role; second, it checks whether the beneficiary role is eligible to receive the airdrop. During the first check, it verifies whether the recipient provided by the user is signed by the beneficiary role, so arbitrarily providing a recipient address without the beneficiary's signature cannot pass the check.If a beneficiary address is specified to construct a signature, it may pass the signature check, but it will not pass the second check for airdrop eligibility. The airdrop eligibility check is performed through a Merkle proof, which should be generated by the official Connext protocol. Therefore, users who are not eligible to receive the airdrop cannot bypass the check to claim someone else's airdrop.

ChainCatcher news, OKX announced that it will upgrade its Proof of Reserves (PoR) to include a complete Merkle Tree disclosure and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) to verify PoR solvency. OKX stated that the upgrade is based on its current Merkle Tree solution: the complete Merkle Tree will take effect in the upcoming March PoR report, allowing anyone to download the complete Merkle Tree to enhance transparency. At the same time, it will maintain account balance privacy by splitting and recomposing each user's balance into several parts (splitting leaf nodes); the Zero-Knowledge Proof upgrade will take effect in the coming months, which is a tamper-proof cryptographic method that allows users to verify that all customer deposits are accounted for and ensures solvency by comparing the net asset value of users with the exchange's reserves.The most recent Proof of Reserves from OKX showed that the exchange holds $8.6 billion in BTC, ETH, and USDT, with the next monthly PoR expected to be released around March 20. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, according to Cointelegraph, the Singapore fintech platform Cake DeFi has used Merkle trees to publish proof of reserves. This feature allows the public to access the Merkle tree proof of reserves on its website, enabling users to verify their assets as well as the company's liabilities. Cake DeFi will also allow users to see how yields are generated and provide real-time on-chain data regarding customer funds. (Source link)

ChainCatcher news, the cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX has announced the launch of a Proof of Liability (PoL) system, which allows depositors to independently verify their liabilities on the total liabilities balance sheet of the cryptocurrency trading platform.It is reported that the self-verification process can be conducted without a third-party auditor. Customer privacy will be protected as account balances are randomly divided into multiple leaves of a Merkle tree. Reserve and liability snapshots are released every Tuesday and Thursday respectively. (Source link)

ChainCatcher news, Binance announced the launch of an asset reserve proof system, adopting a Merkle tree data structure, which will push the work of keeping user assets transparent into a new process. At the initial launch, the system will provide users with proof of BTC assets, and in the coming weeks, it will gradually support more assets and networks. According to the results of the first audit, the current BTC on-chain reserve is 582,485.9302 BTC, with a user net balance of 575,742.4228 BTC, resulting in a reserve ratio of 101%. The second batch of asset reserve proof results will be announced in the next two weeks, which will include more assets.Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao stated: "In light of recent events, we see that the community's demands for cryptocurrency trading platforms will far exceed those for current traditional financial institutions. This is why we are pleased to provide users with this latest verification feature to verify that their funds are safe." (Source link)

ChainCatcher news, Binance CEO Zhao Changpeng tweeted that the crypto industry will be more transparent than the traditional financial industry. The Merkle tree proof of reserves is coming soon. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, cryptocurrency derivatives exchange Deribit has disclosed its asset holdings and will release a Merkle Tree proof of reserves for its reserve assets.According to the wallet snapshot update from Deribit on November 12 at 00:00, it holds 50,600 bitcoins, 516,200 ethers, and 476,000 SOL in its wallet, with third-party custodial assets including 6,500 bitcoins, 8.48 ethers, and 152,000 SOL. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, the encrypted exchange Deepcoin will announce the merkle tree proof of reserves (POF) within a few weeks and will regularly provide third-party audit reports issued by global authoritative institutions to ensure over 100% reserve coverage. At that time, a self-query function will be available to all users.

ChainCatcher message, in response to CZ's suggestion that cryptocurrency exchanges should conduct Merkle tree proof of reserves, Tron founder and Huobi Global Global Advisory Committee member Justin Sun tweeted: "Historically, both Poloniex and Huobi Global have done this. Huobi actually just did it again about a month ago. But we are happy to respond to CZ's proposal to do it a third time. Merkle tree proof of reserves is 100% important for transparency in our industry and exchanges." (source link)

ChainCatcher message, OKX official tweeted: "It is crucial for all major cryptocurrency exchanges to publicly share their auditable merkle tree reserve proofs or POF. We plan to release ours in the coming weeks (within 30 days). This is an important step in establishing baseline trust in the industry." (source link)

Chain Catcher news, Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman commented on the attack incident of the BNB Chain cross-chain bridge BSC Token Hub, stating that the key issue in this incident is that the hacker was able to forge the Merkle proof. This should not have happened, as Merkle proofs are supposed to provide high integrity. Blockchain light clients (and IBC) are built on top of Merkle proofs, and many blockchains store data in Merkle trees, allowing for the generation of proofs that certain data is included in the tree.The Cosmos chain uses a Merkle tree called IAVL, and the IAVL repository has made an API available that uses a RangeProof. However, it has been found that there are serious flaws in the internal workings of RangeProof. The issue with the IAVL RangeProof code is that it allows the Left and Right fields of the InnerNode to be filled, and the attacker essentially exploited the advantage of pasting information into the Right field, which was never validated and never affected the hash calculation, leading the verifier to believe that certain leaf nodes are part of the tree. As a result, they successfully forged the Merkle proof.Buchman stated that while using RangeProof is not a good idea, there is a way to address this issue: preemptively rejecting the proof when any internal node has both the left and right fields filled. For the Merkle proof in IBC, IBC does not use the built-in RangeProof system of the IAVL tree, but instead uses the ICS23 standard to generate and validate Merkle proofs from the IAVL tree. The ICS23 code does not have this vulnerability, as it explicitly "rejects" RangeProof. (Source link)