Business intelligence firm and corporate bitcoin holder MicroStrategy acquired an additional 7,420 for approximately $458.2 million at an average price of $61,750 per bitcoin between Sept. 13 and Sept. 19, according to an SEC filing on Friday.

The company now holds 252,220 BTC, worth roughly $15.8 billion. MicroStrategy’s total holdings were bought at an average price of $39,266 per bitcoin, a total cost of around $9.9 billion, including fees and expenses, according to the company's founder and executive chairman, Michael Saylor.

The announcement follows earlier news on Friday of MicroStrategy completing an upsized $1.01 billion private offering of convertible senior notes due 2028, with a 0.625% coupon and a 40% conversion premium.

As the company confirmed earlier this week, it planned to use the proceeds to fully redeem its $500 million senior secured notes due 2028, expected to be completed on Sept. 26, and to use any balance of the net proceeds “to acquire additional bitcoin and for general corporate purposes.” Upon redemption, the collateral securing these notes, including approximately 69,080 bitcoins valued at $4.4 billion, will be released, the firm stated in the filing.

MicroStrategy’s latest bitcoin purchase follows its acquisition of 18,300 BTC for $1.1 billion between Aug. 6 and Sept. 12.

MicroStrategy’s share price remains flat in pre-market trading on Friday morning, down 0.3% at $144.26, according to TradingView. The stock is up 3.5% over the past month and 108.9% year-to-date.

MSTR/USD price chart. Image: TradingView.

Bitcoin is currently trading for $62,940, according to The Block's bitcoin price page, down 0.5% over the past 24 hours.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2024 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Jump Crypto, a Web3 infrastructure developer, reached a major milestone as an early version of its Firedancer Solana validator client, which has been dubbed “Frankendancer” launches on the Solana mainnet.

During his keynote speech at the Solana Breakpoint event in Singapore, Jump Crypto’s Chief Science Officer Kevin Bowers announced that Frankendancer is now live on the mainnet, while the Firedancer validator is now live on the testnet.

The Firedancer project, led by Jump Crypto, is designed to address Solana's scaling challenges. Jump Crypto has been working on it since 2022.

Frankendancer is a prototype of the full Firedancer validator, which is still under development and undergoing further testing on Solana’s testnet.

Following the Frankendancer upgrade announcement, Solana (SOL) has surged 7% in the last 24 hours, pushing it back above $150. Trading volume also saw a sharp increase, up by over 8%, as per CoinMarketCap data.

Solana has been plagued by performance bottlenecks and outages. Firedancer seeks to optimize hardware utilization and reduce software inefficiencies, pushing Solana’s performance to new heights.

Frankendancer, in its early stage, is a hybrid of Jump Crypto’s Firedancer technology and the Agave validator code. This dual configuration allows Jump to deliver improvements to the network immediately, even before the full Firedancer validator is ready for deployment.

Jump Crypto also said that Firedancer, which is written in C, adds an additional layer of security by diversifying the Solana network’s validator codebase, unlike the original Rust-based validator.

At the event, Bowers noted the significance of the new validator. “A second independent validator has benefits beyond performance, but performance is a prerequisite for reduced costs and increased capacity,” Bowers said. “We are working with the community in all these areas, and as we’ve shown in demos, Agave can hit current protocol caps as is.”

Decrypt reached out to Solana and Jump Crypto to seek comment on the Frankendancer mainnet launch, but did not immediately receive a response.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire expressed his excitement about the development, tweeting, "This is an incredible milestone for our industry."

Jump Crypto reportedly aims to deliver a fully independent Firedancer validator by the end of 2024, boosting Solana's scalability, and performance capabilities.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

As the rate-cutting cycle continues, the crypto market could enter a longer-term upward channel.

Editor: Wu Talks about Blockchain

At 2 a.m. on September 19, the Federal Reserve announced a 50bps rate cut, with the interest rate decision (upper limit) being 5%, the expected 5.25%, and the previous value being 5.50%, the first rate cut since March 2020. Eleven of the 12 voting committee members voted in favor, and Federal Reserve Board member Miki Bowman voted against the move, preferring to lower the federal funds rate target range by 25 basis points at this meeting. This is also the first time since 2005 that a *board member* has expressed dissent.

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 1995.76, up 1.9% (+37.07) since yesterday's close.

Sixteen of 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: APT (+6.9%) and AVAX (+6.5%).

Laggards: XRP (-0.8%) and BCH (-0.3%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Major cryptocurrencies have gained since the U.S. Federal Reserve announced a 50 basis-point cut to the Federal Funds rate on Wednesday. If this market recovery evolves into a sustained bull market, analysts predict a significant increase in Ethereum 's on-chain activity.

Outlier Ventures Research Lead Jasper De Maere indicated that as market conditions improve, there will likely be a significant increase in on-chain activity for Ethereum. Speaking to The Block, he suggested that this activity will be driven primarily by speculation, as well as by increased engagement in decentralized applications.

"We'll see onchain Ethereum activity spike as markets move, so obviously there is speculation and then dApp activity driving onchain activity. I would say it will still be speculation driving and dApp activity will be sustained by airdrops as many companies will have token generation events (TGE) and go mainnet," De Maere said.

The research lead noted that there is currently considerable pent-up demand from projects looking to launch on Ethereum — indicating that as market conditions improve, a wave of new offerings could emerge, driving activity across various cryptocurrency sectors.

Regarding the potential for renewed adoption of the Ethereum network following the Federal Reserve's rate cut, De Maere highlighted DeFi as an area primed for growth. "The smart money that operates onchain will move back to DeFi, which could be bullish for Ethereum," he said.

De Maere stressed that there is a positive correlation between rate cuts, market activity and, ultimately, speculation. "True product adoption stands separate from market activity. While financial incentives could drive short-term adoption of Ethereum, the real sticky users come from the functionality of the product and not for financial gains," he added.

He also pointed out that one potential casualty of improved liquidity and heightened risk appetite, fueled by anticipated further rate cuts from the Fed, could be a slowdown in the adoption of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. "This is largely because most tokenization has occurred in yield-bearing assets, such as U.S. Treasury bills."

De Maere's perspective aligns with a recent report from Steno Research, which emphasized historical trends showing that ether, the native token of the Ethereum network, tends to see substantial gains during prolonged bull markets. In the last bull market from 2020 to 2021, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, cryptocurrencies experienced unprecedented growth, with ether more than doubling in value relative to bitcoin.

Despite underperforming compared to bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies in recent months — showing only an 11.62% year-to-date increase against bitcoin's 50.65% rise — there are tentative signs today that ether, the second-largest digital asset by market cap, is starting to recover from months of stagnation. In the past 24 hours, ether has outperformed bitcoin, rising by around 5% while bitcoin has traded flat.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2024 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Microstrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), a publicly traded company known for its commitment to bitcoin, has completed a $1.01 billion offering of 0.625% convertible senior notes due 2028. The company intends to use part of the proceeds to acquire more bitcoin (BTC), alongside redeeming $500 million of senior secured notes.

The move underscores Microstrategy’s long-term bitcoin strategy, with the company already holding approximately 244,800 BTC before the announcement. The new purchases will further solidify its position as one of the largest corporate holders of bitcoin.

The company’s recent note offering reportedly saw significant institutional interest, with a total of $135 million in additional notes sold after initial demand. These unsecured senior notes will pay interest semi-annually at a rate of 0.625%, maturing in 2028.

The notes are convertible into cash, shares of Microstrategy’s class A common stock, or a combination of both, providing flexibility for investors. Proceeds from the sale will not only fund more bitcoin acquisitions but also general corporate purposes, according to the company’s press release.

This article will review several popular Meme projects on the three major public chains from the perspectives of transaction volume, fund pool size and recent popularity.

Written by: Alvis, Mars Finance

Against the macro backdrop of interest rate cuts, the crypto market is gradually recovering, and the long-awaited meme season seems to be brewing.

Two weeks after the launch of the capitalized $NEIRO, the lowercase $Neiro, which represents the power of the community, was launched on Binance and skyrocketed nearly 30 times in just two days, and reached an astonishing 600 times in the past month. The crypto community cheered for this, and many investors achieved financial freedom again. The craze caused by the lowercase $Neiro not only quickly went viral, but also thoroughly ignited the discussion and participation of the on-chain meme.

The YouTube channel of India’s Supreme Court was compromised on Friday in a first such incident for the judicial body.

The channel, which otherwise streams court cases for viewers and the press, showed videos promoting XRP tokens. Its name was changed to “Ripple.live24.”

A blank video titled "Brad Garlinghouse: Ripple Responds To The SEC's $2 Billion Fine! XRP PRICE PREDICTION" went live on the channel in the European morning hours. The video and the channel were taken down shortly afterward.

“This is to inform all concerned that the YouTube channel of Supreme Court of India has been taken down. The services on YouTube channel of Supreme Court of India will be resumed shortly,” the Supreme Court said in a statement shared with local media companies.

The compromise came ahead of several crucial cases scheduled for Friday, the Times of India reported.

Defunct stablecoin firm Terraform Labs has had its application for Chapter 11 bankruptcy approved by a Delaware court.

Judge Brendan Shannon called the move a “welcome alternative” that avoids complex further litigation over the losses by Terraform’s investors, according to reporting by Reuters.

The company was mainly known for its TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin and accompanying Luna (LUNA) token. Both assets collapsed in May 2022, wiping out $45 billion in market value overnight and causing bankruptcies throughout the crypto industry. It led to a “crypto winter” that lasted well over a year.

Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) crashed due to exposure to Terraform’s TerraUSD (UST) and Luna (LUNA) tokens, later leading to extensive litigation on the part of 3AC to receive compensation.

The news comes after Terraform filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2024. Months later, the firm agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a $4.47 billion settlement after being found guilty of defrauding investors.

Terraform founder and former CEO Do Kwon, was found to have misled investors about the financial stability of his firm, at one point claiming that TerraUSD, which was meant to be pegged to $1, was used by a popular Korean mobile payments app.

Both Kwon and Terraform Labs have been found guilty of civil fraud charges by a U.S. court, though Kwon had denied innocence up until this point.

However, the SEC may ultimately collect little from today’s decision as the settlement amount will only be paid to the regulator if Terraform covers all other losses in its liquidation process.

The company estimated it could ultimately pay between $184.5 million and $442.2 million to investors and other stakeholders as part of the liquidation, but the company admitted that the total value of the eligible crypto losses remained “impossible to estimate.”

Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon spent years evading the authorities while staying in various locations throughout Europe and Asia.

The 33-year-old disgraced entrepreneur was arrested in the European country of Montenegro on false passport charges in December 2023, and both the U.S. and South Korea attempted to extradite him.

Following an August ruling by Montenegro’s Supreme Court, Kwon is now facing extradition to his native South Korea.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

$EIGEN will start trading in just 10 days on Sept 30.

With 12% of EIGEN in circulation, it will launch with a market cap of ~$600M and ~$5B FDV.

This will put EIGEN at 123rd in market cap, below $DYDX and above $NEXO.

Seems low? NFA!

Unfortunately, EIGEN has dropped from $10 to $3 since the first stakedrop.

Token is down probably due to two major reasons:

• General bearish market

• Increasing number of competitors, notably Karak and Symbiotic

-----

Interestingly, Eigenlayer chose to bypass Season 3 and instead opted for "Programmatic Incentives."

AIRDROPS ARE DEAD, LONG LIVE LIQUIDITY MINING

The remaining 67M community tokens will be distributed in the first year.

Weekly distribution: 1.29M EIGEN tokens ($3.8M USD)

• 10% (~128K EIGEN) to operators.

• 90% (~1.1M EIGEN) to stakers.

According to @june023_eth calculations it will give 1.4% extra APR for ETH/LST, and 16% APR for EIGEN restakers.

----

Inflation really starts to kick in when unlocks for insiders (VCs, team...) begin.

55% of the total supply is allocated to them at 1-year cliff and a 2-year vesting.

-----

Note that enabling tradability news comes from the EtherFi team, not Eigenlayer.

But back in May, Eigenlayer promised transferability by Sept 30, aligning with their decentralization goals.

The Eigenlayer Foundation has just shared updates on these plans.

----

Let me know if I made some mistakes in calculations. Feeling real sick today :(

The global influence of Web3 payments is rapidly expanding.

Written by: Liu Honglin, Founder of Shanghai Mankiw LLP

According to Foresight News, Tether's transparency page shows that the authorized issuance of USDT on the TON chain has exceeded $1 billion and reached $1,030,000,002. This data is not only an important milestone in the development of the TON blockchain, but also prompted Mankiw Law Firm's lawyer Liu Honglin to further think about the future of Web3 payments.

The Popularization of Web3 Payments from the Transformation of China's Internet

Globally, China's mobile payment can be said to be far ahead. For ordinary Chinese netizens, sending a red envelope or transferring money on WeChat is a piece of cake, a matter of seconds. Whenever you go abroad, you will realize that the global payment environment is far less convenient than that in China. Although mobile Internet payment is quite popular in cities in some developed countries, in fact, mobile payment is still a luxury in many countries and regions around the world. Bank accounts are not popular in many places, and even basic banking infrastructure is not in place.

This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter, putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.

CoinDesk 20 Index: 2,000.30 +3.89%

Bitcoin (BTC): $63,503.69 +1.57%

Ether (ETH): $2,544.28 +4.77%

S&P 500: 5,713.64 +1.7%

Gold: $2,611.84 +0.95%

Nikkei 225: 37,723.91 +1.53%

Bitcoin rose above $64,000 during the Asian morning as the Bank of Japan kept rates unchanged in a positive signal for risk assets. It subsequently pared some of its gains to settle around $63,500, 1.9% higher in the last 24 hours. The BoJ's move avoided a repeat of its rate hike in July, which caused a slide in crypto markets. Traders observed that macroeconomic data is a source of optimism for riskier assets like BTC. “The US 2Y/10Y treasury spread, an indicator of recession, has been inverted since July 2022 but has recently steepened to +8bps,” QCP Capital traders said in a market broadcast Friday. “This reflects market optimism and a shift towards risk-on assets.”

Ether may be about to shine after underperforming against the wider crypto market this year, according to a new report by Steno Research. ETH has gained around 8% this year, compared with BTC's 40%. However, ether's performance during the last bull market could provide some clues as to what to expect now. ETH surged thanks to greater onchain activity from DeFi, stablecoin issuance and NFTs. The Federal Reserve interest-rate cut earlier this week will result in increased onchain activity, which will strongly benefit Ethereum, Steno said. "Ethereum's active addresses remain strong, particularly when factoring in the growing adoption of rollups," analyst Mads Eberhardt wrote, adding that the network's transactional revenue looks to have bottomed in August.

More than 250 "Satoshi era" BTC moved on Friday, in a rare instance of bitcoin mined in the cryptocurrency's early days becoming active. The Satoshi era refers to the period between 2009 and 2011, when bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto was active in the community before disappearing. The bitcoin were transferred in transactions of 50 BTC to new wallets during the European morning, on-chain tracker Whale Alerts flagged on X. Several "Satoshi era" bitcoin have been active in the past few years. In July 2023, a wallet dormant for 11 years transferred $30 million worth of the asset to other wallets, and in August, another wallet transferred 1,005 BTC to a new address.

- James Van Straten

In the past five days, bitcoin (BTC) has surged 7%, breaking through $64,000 for the first time since Aug. 26. Gold, for its part, has reached all-time highs on over 30 occasions this year, topping $2,600 an ounce. These remarkable performances mark the first time since bitcoin's inception in 2009 that both are the top-performing assets of the year, according to Charlie Bilello, the chief market strategist at Creative Planning, an investment management and financial planning firm.

Year-to-date, gold has risen 27%, surpassing its 2020 performance of 25%. The last time it did better was 2007. What is driving this impressive rise?

Gold has historically been seen as a hedge against monetary debasement and global uncertainty, and current economic conditions suggest it is again fulfilling this role. The recent surge in gold prices can be attributed to these factors. Notably, gold began its rally before the significant monetary debasement triggered by the Covid pandemic in 2020, while bitcoin emerged as a star performer in late 2020 and into 2021. With bitcoin now just 14% away from its all-time high, is it playing catch-up once again?

A closer examination reveals that bitcoin's price tends to move in line with the Federal Reserve's net liquidity metric. This measure, calculated by subtracting reverse repo and the Treasury General Account from the Fed's balance sheet, indicates that bitcoin tends to follow liquidity trends.

Both bitcoin and net liquidity bottomed out toward the end of 2022, coinciding with the FTX collapse. Since then, bitcoin has steadily risen alongside an increase in net liquidity, which now exceeds $6 trillion.

The Federal Reserve's balance sheet is currently at $7.1 trillion, and although it is still engaging in quantitative tightening, the pace has slowed. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023 led to a $1.6 trillion reduction in the balance sheet, bringing it back to levels seen during the initial phases of quantitative easing in response to the pandemic.

The draining of reverse repo balances, now just over $300 billion, releases liquidity back into the financial system. This is stimulative, increasing the availability of funds for lending, investment, and overall economic activity.

Looking more broadly, the combined balance sheets of the world's 15 largest central banks – including the U.S., European Union, Japan and China – approach $31 trillion.

While this number alone is not the focus, the trend shows a global resurgence in central bank balance sheets from about $30 trillion in July. This increase in liquidity is particularly stimulative for bitcoin, which tends to mirror liquidity trends.

Adding to this, just Wednesday the Fed cut the interest rate by 50 basis points, further supporting the rise of bitcoin and gold.

Remember when switching from iPhone to Android was simply a hassle? Brace yourself: With today’s launch of iPhone 16 and the proliferation of personalized AI clouds, it's about to be virtually impossible.

Tech titans are wielding AI as if it were superglue, making it increasingly difficult for users to escape their ecosystems. Apple, Google, Samsung and other major tech companies are placing their bets on AI-as-a-service—not just to enhance your user experience, but to make sure you stay put in their walled gardens forever.

"Anytime you are introducing a new kind of tool, there is variation in the different implementations and approaches that will be big," Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic—a monitoring platform that uses AI to analyze huge amounts of web data in real time—told Decrypt. "So, even if all three of those companies bring out a feature that does the same general thing, at first they are going to do it fairly differently. That is going to increase the lock-in for their users."

The tech behemoths are playing a long game, and your very personal data—the things you buy, food you consume, people you meet, your schedule, and all of the choices you make that define your day-to-day existence—is the ultimate prize.

"To train your AI models, you need data. Lots and lots of data," said Benders. "Who knows the most about you? Who has your photos? Your emails? Your text messages? Your documents?"

That’s been "a huge advantage for companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook," he added, and it tends to make the switching costs too high for most people. With the access that AI will increasingly have to the rest of your life, you're going to want to fight rather than switch.

Users' own data is ultimately more lucrative than publicly available data, because it provides a level of customization that cannot be achieved by a competitor with a generic training dataset. The platform that owns your most-personal data will own you as a lifetime customer.

Imagine a not so distant future when Apple rolls out its home robot helper—think "Sunny," the, not coincidentally, Apple TV series. It makes sense that your new adorable robot, which would run on “Apple Intelligence,” is required to connect to your Personal Cloud once it's unboxed.

Lock in aside, there are bigger potential dangers. The writer Yuval Noah Harari, in his new book, Nexus, cautions that AI is using this personalization to create digital intimacy, which he says is dangerous and will lead us further into a dystopia.

The iPhone 16, arriving in stores today, was built with AI at its core. And the more you rely on it, the harder it will become to leave. Apple Intelligence will be able to follow complicated voice interactions, tag your relatives, create movies, let users interact with its gallery, categorize emails, and of course super-charge Siri with ChatGPT—and that’s just the start.

Why would anyone switch to Android and lose access to the intimate knowledge Apple Intelligence has about you?

For the foreseeable future, for consumers, there is no data portability for AI models. These models are trained specifically with your data and continuously improve as they gather more information. It is impossible to train the same model twice with different foundational technologies, and the closest thing users can do is take all limited data such as photos, contacts, and interoperable documents from one platform, migrate to a second one, and start from scratch training a new AI-based system.

"Every company in every industry is looking at how they can use AI to increase differentiation for their product," Benders said. However, he notes that features alone won't be the differentiator: "The real moat in AI will be those 'personal AI clouds,' because that is where your data will be—and the capital, because AI is a very expensive business right now."

This strategy isn't unique to Apple, of course. Google's AI-driven features in the Pixel phone series and Samsung's Galaxy AI are following suit, each creating their own sticky ecosystem. A key difference between last year's Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and the current S24 Ultra is the device’s readiness for AI.

The AI competition in China is even more heated, with consumer tech companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi powering widely diverse Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems with proprietary AI and personal clouds. Huawei is even investing in AI-powered home robots.

During its recent developer conference, Huawei showcased how its PanGu Foundational AI model is capable of controlling its proprietary robot to not only recognize objects, but also perform daily chores like organizing household items or handling laundry.

This type of robot, built to interact seamlessly with the user's ecosystem, is part of Huawei’s broader vision for tech in which AI agents don't just live on your phone, but in your home—performing tasks autonomously. “It can even cook you lunch!” Huawei said in a short video introducing its model.

Huawei has already introduced an AI-controlled robotic dog that leverages Huawei’s cloud data to improve at different tasks such as ground recognition and overall movement. This cloud was described as “the metaverse for robots” in an official Huawei Linkedin post.

Meanwhile, Chinese giant Xiaomi’s IoT ensemble includes smartphones and watches, all the way to cars, home products, and even clothing. Every smart device linked to your Xiaomi account communicates with your phone, giving you granular levels of data, personalization, tasks, and insights that no other company is able to provide without relying on third-party data. (It also has an AI-powered robotic dog, specifically trained to mimic real pets and serve as a good companion.)

But in the West, "Apple is going the farthest to embed AI as just a thing powering new features that are interesting on their own merits,” Nathaniel Whittemore, an AI expert and CEO of AI skilling company Superintelligent, told Decrypt. "In other words, they're not selling 'AI'–they're selling what AI can do for you."

He added: "It's definitely possible that AI makes ecosystem lock-in even worse, given how much personalized AI will rely on having access to personal data."

So what choice do we have if we care about privacy and the freedom to switch to another platform?

"There's no practical alternative at the moment," Whittemore said. Users can either give up their data or dumb down their devices—which is what’s happening in Europe, where the European Union is compelling Apple to open up its operating system to third-party developers. If and when it rolls out Apple Intelligence there—it’ll be an iOS upgrade to iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro in the U.S., expected in October—is anyone’s guess.

Will we ever get to a point where interoperability is mandated and forced on the consumer electronics industry? Don’t hold your breath.

"I think true interoperability is a long way out,” said Benders. “The most important thing to remember about recent AI developments is that this is still really a new technology. Not only do we not know how much it can do yet, we don't really even know what kinds of things it can do."

Edited by Josh Quittner and Andrew Hayward

🧐 Apart from $SUI, I think the most eye-catching performer in the past two days is $DODO——

Can the strong layout of MEME and BTCFi assets become the growth engine of DODO?

After the announcement of the interest rate cut, people did not wait for the expected decline. Instead, today's rebound of ETH made many tracks feel a little free, especially some track leaders:

$SUI positive news plus the recovery of the market led to a continuous rise, and it is still continuing. Like the last rise, the style is strong.

In addition, today we saw that DODO is one of the strongest in the Defi sector, with a large increase in volume for four consecutive days, which obviously means that big moves are coming;

Speaker: Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Compiled by: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

With the rapid development of blockchain technology, Ethereum has become a leader in the industry and has made great achievements. However, after 9 years of development, Ethereum took 5 years to finalize the expansion plan and another 7 years to complete the transformation from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). Ethereum has never been clear about what it wants to be. The expansion plan keeps changing and there is no clear direction.

Compared to the confusion of Ethereum, Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin, delivered a keynote speech titled "Why SOL Will Flip ETH" at the Token2049 conference held on September 19, expressing his expectations for the future of Solana. The entire community has come together around a common vision - "decentralized Nasdaq", and everyone is moving in the same direction. Golden Finance has compiled the content of Kyle Samani's speech as follows for readers.

Feline Telegram game Catizen has announced that its token can be used to gain a ticket to future airdrops through a season pass. This comes amid the launch and airdrop of its CATI token on The Open Network (TON).

Catizen’s initial airdrop plans to reward players of its swipe-to-earn game with 15% of its total token supply. The token launch and airdrop is taking place today. 

Players weren’t entirely pleased when this was announced last week as they believed, as per the game’s whitepaper, 34% would be allocated to the airdrop. However, this was because Catizen was holding back 19% for a “quarterly season airdrop campaign,” which it’s not been revealed is coming in the form of an airdrop pass.

“The remaining 19% will primarily be distributed through the Airdrop Pass,” the Twitter announcement said. “The Airdrop Pass will have a 90-day cycle, distributing 1% of tokens per season. Players can earn points by completing tasks, and the airdrop pass will display players' points along with those of all Catizen players.”

This would mean that Catizen has enough remaining tokens to support 19 seasons, which will span 4 years and 8 months. While players were disappointed with their current airdrop allocation, drawn from a significantly larger portion of the total supply, these future airdrops will be buffed up with rewards from partner projects.

Tap-to-earn Telegram games suffer an existential threat of providing short-term airdrop incentives while attempting to remain sustainable across the long-term. Previous projects like Notcoin had to completely reinvented itself to keep players interested. Now as it faces the same problem, Catizen is looking to create an economic model that will support airdrops over the coming years.

It appears that the airdrop pass will be purchasable with the CATI token, as the announcement calls it a use case for the new coin, but how much it’ll cost is currently unclear.

Catizen received major backlash from its community as it was revealed to players the total amount of CATI tokens they’d earned for the airdrop. Gamers had been grinding for months in the hopes of getting a sizable chunk of tokens but many were disappointed.

It wasn’t just the size of the airdrop that annoyed players, some were also peeved by poorly communicated changes to the airdrop criteria and transparency about how the token supply was being divided. As the airdrop neared, Catizen changed the weighting of its airdrop criteria after discovering some players had been artificially boosting their earnings. While this reduced the efficiency of cheating, it also weakened those legitimately grinding the game.

In the recent announcement, Catizen claims to have heard the community and committed to change its future behavior accordingly.

“We've listened and will implement a fully transparent distribution model for CATI in the Airdrop Pass season one,” Catizen posted on Twitter.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

Cat-themed memecoins aren’t just meowing but roaring back in an indication of risk-on sentiment starting to return to the broader crypto market.

Tokens such as Solana-based POPCAT, cat in a dog’s world (MEW), Ethereum-based MOG, and BNB Chain-based Simon’s Cat (CAT) have climbed up to 40% in a one-week period, with a bulk of gains coming since Wednesday when the U.S. Federal Reserve cut rates by 50 basis points for the first time in four years - fuelling prices of risk assets, including bitcoin (BTC).

Popcat, a token tied to a meme of a cat with its mouth popped open, is nearing $1 billion market cap. Culture coin mog has jumped 70% in the past two weeks amid its strong cult following on social platforms, where the community often replies to posts with “mogging” and “mogged” to improve its visibility.

The newly released CAT has quickly climbed to become one of the biggest cat memes, seeing over $145 million in exchange bets in the past 24 hours. The token is officially tied to the Simon’s Cat comic series.

Since early 2023, meme tokens have been increasingly seen as a leveraged way to bet on the growth of their underlying blockchains, and crypto traders refer to them as beta bets.

Cat-themed tokens have emerged as a new cohort alongside dog-themed Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), among the biggest gainers in the 2020-2021 bull run.

Their relatively smaller total market capitalization makes cat memes a stronger attraction than their dog-themed counterparts: The dog memes sector tracked by CoinGecko shows a 4% average gain in the past 24 hours, compared to a 14% bump on cat tokens.

Some market makers expect memecoins, alongside alternative tokens, to continue surging in the coming months.

"Memecoins are experiencing a surge largely due to the anticipation of increased liquidity following the Federal Reserve's recent 0.5% interest rate cut,” Alex Andryunin, founder of Gotbit Hedge Fund, known for backing memecoinds, said in a message to CoinDesk. “Market expectations for lower rates have converged, and with the prospect of more liquidity entering the financial system, investors are adopting a bullish sentiment.”

“We anticipate that the memecoin market could grow significantly over the next two months. The increased liquidity and a heightened appetite for risk may drive investors toward these high-risk, high-reward assets, potentially leading to a boom similar to previous cycles,” Andryunin added.