ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Tron founder Justin Sun provided crucial funding support for the TrueUSD (TUSD) stablecoin between 2023 and early 2024, addressing a reserve shortfall of nearly $456 million.According to court documents in Hong Kong, the reserves of TUSD issuer Techteryx became unrecoverable after being invested in Aria-related entities, leading to a severe liquidity crisis. Although Justin Sun publicly stated that he only served in an advisory role, he actually provided emergency funding support during the crisis, allowing TUSD to continue meeting user redemption demands.The case also involves allegations against First Digital Trust for unauthorized fund transfers to a Dubai entity, as well as multiple challenges faced by TUSD, including regulatory issues and partner bankruptcies in the United States.

ChainCatcher news, Musk posted that xAI has acquired X through an all-stock transaction, and the newly merged entity is unified as XAI HOLDINGS. This deal values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion (i.e., $45 billion minus $12 billion in debt).

ChainCatcher news, Bernstein analysts stated that as exchanges and broker/dealer models begin to merge, the crypto industry is moving towards a more integrated "one-stop" multi-asset investment platform. For example, Coinbase is in deep negotiations to acquire Deribit, Kraken is about to acquire NinjaTrader, and Robinhood is integrating Bitstamp.Analysts noted that Deribit's BTC and ETH options market has a monthly trading volume exceeding $10 billion, accounting for about 70% of the market share, while the monthly trading volume of cryptocurrency futures is around $4.5 billion. The acquisition of Deribit by Coinbase will enable it to expand into the derivatives space, particularly in options, and will compete with Binance in the international crypto derivatives market.

ChainCatcher message, according to Marek Moraczyński, head of the Ethereum client Nethermind, who posted on the X platform, over 80% of the disk space of Ethereum full nodes is occupied by historical records. Therefore, there is no need for data to validate new blocks. In the new version 1.3.1, Nethermind is ready to delete pre-merge historical records through ERA files, and all teams have agreed to carry out the relevant operations on May 1. If all blocks and all receipts are deleted and only the data required to validate the latest block is retained, the capacity of full nodes will be less than 200 GB.

ChainCatcher news, according to Crwe World, the U.S. listed company iClick Interactive Asia Group Limited announced today the progress of its merger with Amber DWM Holding Limited ("Amber DWM") and has received final approval from Nasdaq for the post-merger listing.Upon completion of the merger, the company will be renamed Amber International Holding Limited and will begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Market under the new stock code AMBR starting March 13, 2025. The merged subsidiary will combine with Amber DWM, which will continue as the surviving entity and become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company.It is reported that Amber DWM is the holding entity of Amber Premium, the digital wealth management business under Amber Group.

ChainCatcher news, according to Barrons, Coinbase has met the conditions to become an acquisition target. If it can merge with a traditional exchange, it could create a company that possesses both expertise and industry influence, thereby dominating the currently fragmented cryptocurrency market.Currently, Coinbase has a price-to-earnings ratio of about 22 times and a total market capitalization of approximately $52 billion. However, major U.S. exchanges have the capability to make this deal happen. The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange—Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)—has a market capitalization of up to $100 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 36 times. Its CEO, Jeffrey Sprecher, is married to Kelly Loeffler, a member of the Trump administration.The global futures trading giant CME Group has a market capitalization of $93 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 26 times. Nasdaq is known for its technological strength and global network, with a market capitalization of $47 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 41 times. If Coinbase can collaborate with major U.S. exchanges, it will be able to unlock doors to power and markets that may currently seem out of reach.Large investors may push for a top exchange to acquire Coinbase, allowing the new company to maximize investment returns as cryptocurrency gradually moves from the financial frontier to the mainstream.

ChainCatcher news, according to Jinshi reports, the European Central Bank's payment system experienced a major failure last Thursday, and the chaos that ensued during the 10 hours it took to identify and resolve the issue led to disruptions in welfare payments for over 15,000 Greeks, a large number of wages and pensions in Austria, and several financial transactions. The situation could have potentially worsened.If the situation had occurred or continued into the next day, i.e., at the end of February, it would have been a payday for many public sector employees, pensioners, and welfare recipients, and this chaos could have impacted millions of people and businesses, putting a strain on the banking system. According to officials from the Eurozone central bank, the core of the escalating turmoil was a hardware failure, but technicians took hours to identify the problem after initially misdiagnosing a database issue.Markus Ferber, a member of the European Parliament and a member of the committee overseeing the European Central Bank, stated, "A hardware failure is forgivable, but it is inexcusable if there is no backup that can be immediately activated when problems arise." An official from the European Central Bank indicated that the affected hardware did indeed have multiple backups, and the bank is analyzing why they did not activate.

ChainCatcher news, according to Forbes, Bitcoin has long been hailed as "digital gold," but Ethereum has quietly surpassed Bitcoin in a key metric in recent years: supply expansion.Since the merge in September 2022, Ethereum's supply growth rate has been lower than Bitcoin's, challenging the long-held assumption that Bitcoin is the best form of sound money. Unlike Bitcoin's fixed cap of 21 million coins, Ethereum's design is adaptive, allowing its supply to expand or contract based on network activity.Analysts believe that Bitcoin ensures absolute scarcity, while Ethereum is more adaptive and flexible, able to adjust according to market conditions. If sound money means supply growth, Ethereum has unexpectedly surpassed Bitcoin in this regard in recent years.

ChainCatcher news, Bitcoin mining company Stronghold announced that its shareholders voted "in favor" of the upcoming merger between Stronghold and Bitfarms Ltd. by an overwhelming majority. The merger agreement and plan are set to be signed on August 21, 2024, and will be revised thereafter.After the merger agreement proposal is approved, the company expects the merger to be completed by March 2025, subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the remaining closing conditions. The final report of the special shareholders' meeting results will be submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the form of an 8-K.

ChainCatcher message, ApePro announces that it is merging with Jupiter, and ApePro will be renamed to Jup Trenches to continue providing services. The features of Jup Trenches include dual account types, private key export, real-time data, etc. This transition will take some time, during which ApePro will run in parallel, and the official will provide further notifications after the migration is completed. User accounts can be used normally.In addition, to thank the ApePro community, both parties will specifically conduct a Jupuary airdrop for ApePro users in March.

ChainCatcher news, the Pando Fund released a research report titled "Decentralized AI Changed by Deepseek," which points out that the narrative of decentralized AI is continuously reshaping. Web3 AI companies can focus on replicating DeepSeek's success while offering new advantages such as multimodality, user ownership, censorship resistance, and privacy. It is expected that the number of projects on the supply side will continue to grow, while consumer-facing projects will begin to compete with Web2 counterparts by building community-participated networks. In the coming year, AI models developed based on a complete Web3 AI stack will emerge one after another.In addition, companies combining AI and crypto are gradually adjusting their strategies to focus on infrastructure building rather than model development. For example, companies in the GPU market like Akash, Render, IoNet, and Exabits have developed sustainable revenue models. Meanwhile, businesses like Grass and Gradient, which allow users to share network bandwidth, have found their market positioning by providing distributed network services to Web2 clients. In inference tasks, the performance gap between small models and large models is narrowing, which means that Web3 does not need to rely on the massive computing power of traditional AI giants and can utilize these streamlined models for efficient inference operations. As this trend develops, we may see more inference endpoints driven by decentralized computing networks in the future.

ChainCatcher message, Federal Reserve's Goolsbee stated that the path to a 2% inflation rate looked good before new uncertainties emerged.

ChainCatcher news, former Coinbase CTO Balaji stated that as traditional IPO and merger & acquisition (M&A) paths are obstructed, Security Token Offerings (STO) on the blockchain may become a new avenue for tech companies to raise funds. He pointed out that the SEC's regulatory rules make it difficult for small companies to go public, and the recent tough stance of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on large-scale mergers further limits the exit routes for startups. This policy environment may weaken the funding flow and competitiveness of the startup ecosystem.However, he believes that changes in the crypto policy landscape have opened the door for STOs, and the new government's supportive attitude towards cryptocurrencies makes blockchain-based financing models more attractive. STOs can not only reduce the listing costs for small businesses but also provide startups with a source of capital independent of large tech companies. Balaji emphasized that this model aligns with the government's goal of keeping small businesses independent while also offering global investors the opportunity to participate without directly owning control of the enterprise.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, the Ethereum official execution client Geth (go-ethereum) development team issued an emergency announcement on February 18, requiring validators using version v1.15.1 to upgrade immediately to version v1.15.2. This update aims to prevent network stability issues and interruptions in validator operations.The development team pointed out that version v1.15.1 has a regression issue that may cause block creation failures on the Ethereum mainnet, leading validators to miss block production opportunities, resulting in the loss of block rewards and transaction fees.It is reported that Geth is the most widely used execution layer client for Ethereum, with over 40% of validators using this software. This update follows a previous patch that fixed a vulnerability that could lead to denial-of-service attacks on nodes.

ChainCatcher news, THENA proposes a soft merger with the lending platform Venus Protocol. The plan is awaiting approval from the Venus DAO and aims to create an integrated DeFi ecosystem that simplifies trading and lending processes, with the merged entity positioned as the premier "DeFAI super application" on the BNB chain.This merger will combine THENA's deep liquidity infrastructure with Venus's lending capabilities, creating a unified DeFi hub.