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Are there any bulls left?

This time it's a real test of opinions with real money. At the opening, there was a huge difference in the spot contract price, so I went all in long @SaharaLabsAI, but ended up getting wrecked halfway through with half a yu7, sob sob 🥹

I saw that Club Brother and Feng Zong were also going long, but the market is indeed very brutal; contracts really carry a lot of risk. I think I'll stick to spot trading for now, and I’ll continue to keep an eye on purchasing $SAHARA, but why?

First of all, this time I’ve been honest; I don’t dare to benchmark against ScaleAI’s three hundred billion outer circle big brother anymore. Their revenue is indeed much stronger, and their narrative is not limited to just labeling. I don’t have any ideas for now; let’s just observe within the circle first.

From a fundamental perspective, Sahara AI is the second AI Layer1 following Bittensor. Bittensor's $TAO currently has a $6.78B FDV, becoming the leader in Web3 AI infrastructure, and Sahara still has several times the growth potential.

Both are key investment projects of Polychain. This is not just a narrative imagination; with the mainnet launch and the expansion of the AI collaboration ecosystem, the Token will form a positive value flywheel.

More data access will attract more and more models to train on Sahara, and more AI projects will come to apply, launching on the Sahara mainnet, bringing application scenarios for $Sahara. Virtual has already proven that this logic has no issues.

In terms of resources, Sahara is also the second project on Buidlerpad. The first, Solayer, was also heavily dumped after the opening by IDO chips, but then surged five to six times, which was very impressive.

The TGE circulated 2 billion $sahara; the trading volume/market cap has already exceeded twice, and the contract volume is several times higher. The chip turnover is very sufficient; since everyone is so pessimistic, that’s when we strike back.

After OKX and Binance announced the launch of Sahara, @SaharaLabsAI released their Tokenomics and airdrop rules. I checked, and unfortunately, I didn't get the airdrop.

But I can understand. Because I didn't spend much time participating in the labeling, the tasks were indeed a bit difficult. I just logged in daily and went offline, not making any real contributions, so it's normal to be filtered out.

Moreover, they also announced the listing on two major Korean exchanges with the Korean won pair, another grand slam project, and fortunately, I invested through buidlpad.

Looking at the community's gains, compared to another project that silenced everyone during the same period, the Sahara WeChat group I am in is full of joy. As long as we stick to the tasks, 2000 sp can earn over 8000+ tokens.

Many people are also showcasing their gains under the official Twitter airdrop post: the top 1000 UCCY of the third season, a total of 8.6k SP and 5k fragments + 25u of ETH in the wallet, receiving a total of 17K Sahara allocation; Little Bear, who just joined in the third season, still managed to earn over 40K allocation through daily data labeling and screen recording.

This time, Sahara AI's Knowledge Drop strives to cover all contributing users, with a clear and transparent reward mechanism that considers the interests of different roles in the community:
Participants in labeling tasks receive basic airdrops through SP points, ensuring the rights of direct contributors,
Participants in social tasks receive some token incentives based on fragments, while special roles in the community like Mods receive extra USDT rewards (Mods from neighboring communities probably feel heartbroken seeing their efforts turn to zero),
Content creators can participate in the allocation through buidlpad.

Regarding witch identification, it wasn't a blanket judgment. Instead, those identified as witch clusters, such as completely blank accounts, are given a 0.2x multiplier, and this portion is redistributed to addresses holding a small amount of 0.01 ETH, creating a double airdrop, with additional incentives for real users on OKX.

Recently, some projects have allocated shares to Kaito in a bid to control mainstream voices, but whether there is a debt to community participants, everyone has their own scale.

For instance, many creators received tens of thousands of newt tokens to dump before the community airdrop unlock yesterday. This behavior appears to reflect a large vision for creators but is actually just saving their marketing costs, letting the market bear the burden.

In contrast, Sahara's TGE airdrop indeed prioritizes the user community of the product, not directly stuffing tokens to creators; giving some IDO quotas is relatively fair and acceptable for everyone.

Of course, unlocking 44% on the first day, followed by locked and linear releases, does make some community members uncomfortable, but this is also to balance the project's long-term development.

If you need to reward yourself and improve your life in the short term, you can completely choose to hedge, especially since top CEXs have listed it; if you believe in Sahara's core value, then I think waiting is also acceptable.

After all, just a few days ago, Meta spent $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake in ScaleAI, a company in the same data labeling sector, and Innodata's stock price is also skyrocketing. Looking at it this way, Sahara's current valuation isn't actually that high.

Sahara just announced that it will launch the AI Agent Builder and Marketplace Open Beta on the mainnet, allowing creators to fully own AI. Looking at the recent heat of Virtual, there may be many alpha opportunities ahead.

Last time, the proposal to reduce Aptos inflation was passed. Now that the income of big holders is reduced, they can’t just lie down and do something.

In the past few days, the long-lost big dealer Jump has also returned in a high-profile manner through the Aptos ecosystem and signed a contract for aave to be deployed on non-evm chains. This time APT should be, after all, rising, right? Hahaha, the community has really waited too long.

As Rui Shen said, "Aptos, as a legitimate Meta descendant and blue-blooded aristocrat, is most effective in showing political power to improve the stablecoin narrative on the one hand and recruiting a group of web2 companies to use stablecoin scenarios on the other hand. It is more suitable to benchmark trx and xrp in the future."

If it is to be used as a payment settlement layer, in addition to the strong technical strength of the chain itself, the liquidity of assets is also very important.

@hyperion_xyz As the new trading layer and liquidity center of aptos, it is officially supported by OKX and @AptosLabs. In a short period of time, the TVL has exceeded 100 million. From the origin background to the strength of the investors, it is really similar to the MMT I deposit next door. It is so interesting.

If you are interested, you can participate (https://t.co/qHtqqPDCpd). If you have a low risk appetite, you can deposit USD stablecoin pairs (apy about 20% + airdrop points), borrow coins to deposit apt-lst pairs (apy about 40% + points), or buy coins and save them for hedging (OK/BN interest rates are both about 8% annualized), and you can also save the xBTC-USDC pairs recently made by OKX. Even if you don’t hedge, the risk is not high, and the APR can be 180%+. If you have a high risk appetite, you can directly deposit apt trading pairs, especially apt-xBTC pairs.

When matching trading pairs on Hyperion, you must use Hyperion for swaps. Trading can also earn points and lottery draws.

Finally, it should be noted that adding LP will result in impermanent loss. Although the incentive is high, if there is no hedging, the volatility is also large. Then, for the v3 pair, apt will rise sharply and you will have a lot of USD, and fall sharply and you will have another lot of USD. Especially if you set the range very narrow and frequently exceed the range, it will be difficult for short-term handling fees to cover the impermanent loss, which is a bit like the feeling of shark fin options.

Because the big results have just been released, the most popular one now is Kaito construction. In fact, Aptos will give incentives to yappers on the Kaito list every month. I am now 33rd on the monthly list. Why can I get up? The core of Kaito is to write content related to Aptos, which will be captured by the AI ​​algorithm. The best content of a public chain is the CX ecological project. The most popular one at present is Hyperion, so the mental weight will be greater.

Teachers can take a look at Hyperion's mining strategy and then share it on X. Kaito's AI can understand it. Frequent writing about Hyperion will be recognized in the mindshare list of aptos, which can also increase your personal influence. Why not?

Less than a month after the mainnet launch, the BTC-collateralized stablecoin YU from @yalaorg reached its minting limit of 30M, leading them to open the second season on the 13th, which was filled up just yesterday, taking only ten days. The total supply across the network has now exceeded 75M. Let's research why the momentum is so strong.

1. Main Player Analysis

Firstly, on the YBTC chain, we can see that the BTC debt ceiling was filled as soon as it opened, with a total of 970 BTC locked up, but only 93 addresses are involved, clearly dominated by large holders with significant strength.

The underlying logic isn't just simple trust in endorsements from institutions like @Polychain and @EtherealVC, but rather Yala provided a triple guarantee of CDP + self-custody + CRSM for large holders in the early stages of the protocol.

CDP refers to the ability to use WBTC, mainstream LST assets on EVM, or to use native BTC for self-custodial deposits. Native BTC, after being time-locked, exists in the large holder's own address, at which point a corresponding vault is created to mint YU. Once the time expires, the YBTC in the corresponding vault will be destroyed to ensure asset anchoring.

If the vault approaches the liquidation line within the time frame, CRSM will automatically withdraw part of the position from the YU earning scenario to repay the debt and maintain the collateralization ratio. During these days of drastic BTC fluctuations, Yala's collateral system has remained stable.

2. Hot Tracks

As of mid-2025, the top 3 most discussed crypto topics outside the circle have already secured a spot due to Circle's excellent performance post-listing: now the stablecoin battle is not only attracting attention from within the circle but also from outside.

The GENIUS Act has been passed, and @chromitemerge summarized the current major factions: the offshore faction represented by USDT and the son of the Commerce Secretary, 21 Capital; the compliant faction mainly consisting of USDC and Coinbase; new entrant USD1, supported by the Trump family, Binance, and UAE MGX, is sure to want a share of the pie; along with banks and tech giants eyeing the space, it is evident that the entire track will grow larger and will not be limited to just pricing digital assets.

Yala's co-founder @VickyXAI came from Circle; why create Yala? Just like the profits of USDC before it was listed cannot be compared to USDT, as traditional players expand the track, the beneficiaries will certainly be the native stablecoin projects in the crypto space.

Ultimately, on-chain will still return to being on-chain, whether it's CEX, DEX, or stablecoins.

Besides stronger composability on-chain, it’s mainly due to the vast space for compliant arbitrage, which incurs no additional costs from various regulations, so most of YU's profits will be distributed to community participants, allowing Yala's expansion rate to be very fast.

Even for a strong player like PayPal, when it entered the stablecoin market with PYUSD, it offered a 20% annualized subsidy and still took 9 months to reach around 70M supply.

3. Participation Methods

Currently, the second phase of minting is full, but there are still opportunities to join. Retail investors can easily participate by directly swapping for some YU and then staking it in the stability pool to earn 10% interest.

Join the team: https://t.co/yuYzJHud1I

For large holders, setting up a vault to mint YU requires paying an annual interest of 9%, but for retail investors, it’s not needed; they can smoothly exchange with USDC 1:1 with virtually no slippage.

Looking solely at the APR itself, it is currently one of the higher-yielding stablecoin investments, as this yield won't be too diluted due to the debt ceiling.

In addition to APR, there are also liquidation profits paid in YBTC and subsequent airdrop rewards in Raspberry points. The number of addresses storing YU on the mainnet is only in the thousands, and now the mainnet gas costs are not high, so I divided several accounts to participate; there might be surprises.

Overall, it is a relatively good farming choice, and any funds not stored in Plasma can fully participate in Yala. There are still over 400,000 YU in LP, so teachers should hurry to stock up and not wait for a premium like with Huma later.

If you have time, you can also sign in daily and interact socially to earn Raspberry points, but testnet and interaction points are separate, and it’s unclear how they will be allocated later.

4. Big Things Are Coming

I recommended Yala when the mainnet launched, but so much has happened in this month, especially with CRCL continuously hitting new highs, which has further boosted my confidence in Yala.

In the past, traditional stablecoins like USDT/USDC saw retail investors contributing liquidity to institutions, which steadily earned treasury yields, and in many DeFi protocols, retail investors had to assume a large part of the smart contract risks to make money.

With Yala, it’s completely different. As mentioned in point 3, the APR profits for retail investors come from the interest paid by large holders for borrowing stablecoins against their collateralized BTC. This model creates a decentralized creditor-debtor relationship between retail and institutional investors, meaning retail investors can become creditors to institutions by holding staked YU, with interest settled in real-time in YU, which is very comfortable.

I followed Yala's official Twitter from the start, and seeing the rapid filling of these two phases, it is likely that the TGE will come soon; otherwise, they wouldn't need to set a debt ceiling.

The CRCL price-to-earnings ratio is over 200, when will $HYPE also be able to blow such a big bubble? Or is it still too simple?

Is there anyone who hasn't registered for ethos?

The evil old forces of wire transfers take several days and still charge a fixed toll of 20 USD. With this kind of behavior, if stablecoins don't put them out of business, I can't eat or sleep peacefully.

After the big gambler James's account was liquidated, the open contracts on hyperliquid did decrease somewhat, but they are still slightly above Huobi's status.

James's identity has two main interpretations besides being a real gambler.

One is business cooperation; today James himself said he has never received money, indeed he has sought money twice, but did not get any, and he also supported cz's claim that the dark pool dex would eliminate hyperliquid.

It’s estimated that hyperliquid doesn't have much budget to give him; if they did, would a big whale just come in and make a trade every time? That wouldn’t be reasonable.

The other interpretation is hedging for money laundering. Currently, there is no clear evidence; mainly, his positions look randomly opened, with too high leverage, and it doesn’t seem like normal behavior. Additionally, he said his cex account has been completely frozen.

Of course, even if it's true, I don’t think it affects $hype in any way. Money laundering is also an important practical attribute; BTC was initially prioritized for money laundering applications.

Hyperliquid has demonstrated that such a large order can be supported by platform liquidity, and the money laundering issue will only arise on cex.

🔆Reconstructing the Underlying Cornerstone of the AI Era: @SaharaLabsAI — Web3 AI Native Operating System Research

In the current wave of integration between Web3 and AI, most projects remain trapped in conceptual narratives and lack substantial infrastructure. Sahara's groundbreaking significance lies in its construction of a complete AI native blockchain operating system for the first time, fundamentally reconstructing the flow of data, models, and value.

1. Structural Opportunities

AI technology is triggering a dramatic change in pricing models, but Web3 faces a core contradiction: the market urgently needs blockchain-level infrastructure that supports the entire lifecycle of AI, while existing public chains are still focused on optimizing transaction efficiency and cannot solve the three unique challenges of AI — trusted execution, asset confirmation, and value distribution.

This is precisely the design origin of the Sahara protocol targeting industry pain points: providing full-stack support for AI assets from creation, verification to transaction through a dual-layer architecture of an AI dedicated Layer1 blockchain + off-chain execution protocol.

2. Moat Advantages

Sahara has successfully run a full link closed loop of “data-model-application-incentive,” forming the three core components of the ecosystem:

Data Service Platform DSP: Connecting 200,000 annotators with over 40 top enterprise clients such as Microsoft/Amazon/MIT, achieving on-chain confirmation and instant settlement of data contributions. For example, MyShell, which was recently supported, improved model accuracy through customized datasets and gave back to the annotators.

AI Developer Platform: Providing a no-code toolchain that supports developers to deploy AI Agents in 10 minutes, significantly lowering the development threshold.

Upcoming AI Asset Market: The first decentralized trading market for models, datasets, and Agents, using a revenue-sharing mechanism to enable contributors to earn long-term benefits.

3. Underestimated Architecture

Compared to Bittensor (whose FDV once exceeded 10 billion), Sahara's core architectural differences lie in:

1. Native AI Layer: An EVM-compatible chain specifically designed for AI scenarios, managing asset registration/authorization/allocation through smart contracts. It also improves cross-chain compatibility, with the protocol deployable on EVM/Sol/Sui public chains and connected to Web2 systems via API, serving as a key gateway for AI services.

2. Off-chain Trusted Execution: TEE environment generates verifiable proofs, resolving the contradiction between complex computations processed off-chain and verification on-chain.

3. Value Distribution: Model/dataset ownership proof ensures sustainable earnings for contributors through assetization.

4. Valuation Logic

After the launch of buidlpad, the most discussed topic is whether the 600M valuation is expensive.
To be honest, it is not cheap. It's certainly impossible for a small AI project to launch and immediately achieve dozens of times returns like virtual projects. However, as an investment, it is worthwhile. Why?

1. The project has entered an accelerated growth phase, with over 3.2 million on-chain accounts on the SIWA testnet within two months and daily active users reaching 1.4 million. Once the mainnet launches with the introduction of the native token, the growth flywheel will be activated.

2. The business model has dual barriers: on the enterprise side, a service capacity validated with tens of millions of dollars in revenue, with clients including academic institutions and tech giants; on the user side, data annotators enter the AI value chain through contributions and can earn passive income through the asset market in the future.

Referring to Solana's path from technical infrastructure to ecosystem explosion, Sahara's current IDO valuation is still in a value lowland: it has a real business model support and occupies an AI operating system-level ecological position.

5. Team Background

Founder Sean Ren is the youngest computer professor at USC, leading the INK Lab, and Tyler Zhou is the former investment director of Binance Labs, raising 43M. Technology and finance are the best combination for the strategic depth of Web3 projects, endowing the project with the unique dual genes of Web3: top AI academic resources and a crypto capital network.

This also explains why Sahara can gain the trust of both Web2 giants and core Web3 developers, becoming one of the few projects bridging resources from both realms. The reason why the IDO is held on buidlpad is that buidlpad is created by former Binance executives and backed by Nomad Capital; the previous project Solayer was also a high-multiple benefit project.

In summary, while the industry is obsessed with packaging AI concepts, Sahara is reconstructing AI production relationships with the posture of an infrastructure behemoth.

It is not only about the premium of a complete architecture but also about establishing a decentralized AI economic system: whether developers, annotators, or investors can share the AI growth dividends through their contributions. With the launch of the AI Marketplace and the expansion of cross-chain ecosystems, Sahara is expected to replicate the value leap from infrastructure to ecosystem explosion seen in early public chains.

The new high should continue to increase positions in $HYPE, don't worry, Jeff will write the essay.

The Silicon Valley tech maverick @bryan_johnson, who attempts to be 'immortal', says he checks his resting heart rate with a wearable device every night before sleeping. He manages to keep his heart rate at 44 (the normal range is 60-100), which leads to a good night's sleep and delays aging. This seems somewhat similar to our traditional 'Turtle Breathing Technique'.

In fact, I also have a wearable device that monitors my heart rate daily.

At the end of last year, after the official Solana retweeted the CUDIS ring, I bought one and have been using it ever since, accumulating a total of 70,000 points, currently ranking around 1500.

@CudisWellness: The body is an asset, health is tokenized.

Some time ago, CUDIS added a wallet function, and recently registered for airdrop addresses. The official announcement clearly stated that the pioneer package was snapshot yesterday, indicating that TGE is imminent. As a community user, let’s discuss our views on valuation.

1. Referring to the industry leader Oura, which had a sales revenue of $500 million last year and completed a $550 million financing round, raising its valuation to $5.2 billion.

CUDIS has an annual revenue of $6 million, with $5 million in financing. A valuation of $55 million for hardware products is quite reasonable, especially since 50% of this share is sold offline, unlike some competitors who mislead us web3 folks and have no competitiveness in the market.

2. After launching the token, is there still potential for future growth?

Currently, there is a real demand source. For example, the pure web2 health app leader AutoSleep has achieved over 200 million RMB in sales just through one of CUDIS's features, sleep monitoring.

In today's increasingly common sub-health state, people's willingness to pay for health is also increasing. Therefore, I estimate that after the token launch, most of the revenue may actually come from the web2 user market.

3. Regarding the 'human mining' aspect of web3 hype, it can be compared to WLD (Iris) and PI (purely community-based). 12 million world id users = 11.3 billion FDV, 19 million PI net users through KYC = 64.5 billion FDV. Roughly, CUDIS's 200,000 app users community valuation is between 180 to 330 million.

Although WLD and PI valuations may have inflated components, for CUDIS, this valuation is still conservative, considering that 10% are high-net-worth users who are different from ordinary users just looking for freebies and are willing to pay several hundred dollars for the ring.

4. Regarding the health data market, the current market share is $400 billion and is growing rapidly. How much of this can CUDIS capture?

Currently, there is no specific data support available, but everyone knows that crypto smart wearable projects can issue tokens, which is a core competitive advantage when competing with traditional web2 companies for market share.

Why does CUDIS call itself the 'Longevity Protocol'? As long as you wear the ring, they are the company that wishes you to live long the most, because as long as users are alive, they will continuously generate real health data, hence they will arrange AI coaches to create health plans for you, helping you slow down aging.

Web3 focuses on user rights, while in the past, user data was taken by traditional giants to train big data algorithms, feed AI, etc., with benefits potentially far exceeding the sale of the devices themselves. The advantage of web3 is that this data will still be sold, but the invisible benefits will be shared with users.

Referring to the comparison table with industry leader Oura, when buying a health ring at the same price, one is a traditional ring that secretly uses your data, and the other is the CUDIS ring that does not lose functionality while providing continuous dividends. Which one would you choose?

Making this choice should be quite simple. The main issue currently is just insufficient promotion, as more affordable products cannot reach all users. As web3 becomes more accepted by the public, CUDIS's future looks promising.

1. No LOUD white, no takeover.

2. If you haven't received the coins, you must hedge, and you cannot close the position.

3. The current position is indeed not as comfortable as it was a month ago; however, apart from $HYPE, I really don't know what else can be bought during the downturn.

4. BN has launched Hype's 75x contract, and lighter (https://app.lighter.xyz/trade/ETH?referral=GNG37NJGU4QF) has also raised the leverage limit for hype to 20x, while HL can only open 5x; competitors are also quite kind.

Recently, my highest ranking on the Kaito mindshare leaderboard is OpenLedger, ranked seventh in the world.

I noticed that Foresight News is also paying attention to this project: @openledgerhq has recently established a foundation, and with the recent change of ticker to the more memorable $OPEN, it seems the TGE is approaching.

Because 🐙 OpenLedger's mission is to monetize AI data and models, the entire economic model will only be fully activated after the $OPEN listing. There will be 2M open distributed to the yapper community, which I am quite looking forward to.

While squeezing my nose to brush Binance Alpha, it is necessary to appropriately go long on BNB.

Why brush.
Alpha is currently an overall very problematic project screening + very misleading data prosperity + exploiting the benefits of some people to distribute to other retail investors + undermining the rationality of industry pricing + reducing uncertainty will definitely lead to the disappearance of high multiple wealth effects... These views remain unchanged, overall Alpha points are still a tumor, and there is little chance of change in the near term, so it is necessary to spend more time adding points and drinking soup, otherwise the losses will be even worse.

Why appropriately go long on BNB.
Alpha seems to have not provided benefits to BNB holders, but in reality it forces a large number of new projects to deploy on BSC. BNB does not differentiate between Binance's main site transaction fees, but it can't resist the increasing number of VC projects all forming BNB pools, priced in BNB.
BSC has transformed from a second-rate dog chain centered around the couple concept into the current external liquidity layer of the universe, Binance. Not only application projects, but also all sorts of miscellaneous layer 1 and 2 projects need to be deployed there.
This is also why I was previously puzzled why so many projects invested by the original Binance Labs were not forced to deploy on BSC or OPBNB. Now it has been achieved in another way. If Bybit had enforced new projects to deploy on Mantle earlier, MNT would have taken off long ago.
Moreover, Binance Alpha has siphoned off part of the income from Bybit and Gate. This state will visibly last for a while, and currently there hasn't been a full market discovery yet.

Every week @kaitoai distributes 5000 $skaito to the top 50 yappers of all/new (less than 1000sf). A snapshot has been taken, and the claim window has not yet opened.
I have been selected as a new type of top 50 yapper for 3 consecutive weeks, come check your x id here 🔗https://kaitoai.notion.site/kaito-yapper-payouts-skaito
I estimate that what many people fantasize about as the second season is actually this long-term plan; I guess there will not be any large-scale airdrops, which is also reasonable for stabilizing the coin price.

Cetus's LP is having issues, as a miner my feelings are quite complicated.

The good news is that I was mining on Aptos's Hyperion and narrowly escaped.

The bad news is that many accounts' LPs have gone out of range. Previously, $APT was quite stable, and the ranges were set relatively narrow. Today, I took a quick look and it actually broke through. After holding for so long, it unexpectedly left me behind…

Fortunately, there are still some LST's LPs🥹

There are many older brothers named Jeff. Earlier this year, I wrote a brief biography of Jeff Yass from Haida, and there are also well-known figures like Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Hyperliquid's Jeff Yan from the crypto space, among others.

This time I discovered another core developer of Bitcoin and Linux, Jeff Garzik @jgarzik, who has made early contributions to Bitcoin's SegWit, JSON-RPC API, CPU miner, Python miner, and other infrastructure, making him one of the most knowledgeable people about BTC in the industry.

Looking back at Jeff Garzik's Twitter timeline over the past decade, it's easy to see how he differs from those BTC fundamentalists.

Many people believe that BTC is sufficient as the best value storage asset, which indeed was the best choice at the beginning of its design, bringing BTC nearly twenty years of faultless security.

However, with BTC now having a trillion-dollar market value, even a slight increase in leverage can impact the global economy. Jeff Garzik has been very enthusiastic about helping BTC holders build native yield since ten years ago.

Based on this philosophy, over the years Jeff Garzik and several other developers have built projects such as Bloq and Vesper. Unlike those chasing trends with continuous entrepreneurship, their teams are stable, clear in direction, and strong in execution.

From infrastructure development in 2015 to DeFi in 2020, and last year, they shifted their focus to @hemi_xyz, a modular Layer-2 network.

Hemi received $15 million in support from institutions like Yzi Labs (formerly Binance Labs). The mainnet was launched two months ago, achieving native 'Bitcoin programmability'. In just 38 days after launch, the TVL reached $1 billion, and currently, the TVL is $1.2 billion, quietly becoming the second-largest Bitcoin Layer-2.

Connecting BTC and ETH is the core issue of the BTC ecosystem Layer2. A common transitional solution on ETH is cross-chain (custodial mapping), and some BTC L2s have adopted this model, like another Jeff from Merlin. This model carries centralization risks, especially after Sun's involvement with WBTC raised widespread concerns recently.

The #HEMI approach is to integrate a complete Bitcoin node into the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This innovative model combines the security of Bitcoin with the flexibility of Ethereum, unlocking direct access to fine-grained Bitcoin states for smart contracts, allowing users to lend native BTC through fully indexed nodes without relinquishing BTC control, utilizing DeFi protocols.

In terms of security, through another co-founder Maxwell Sanchez's PoP consensus, Hemi inherits Bitcoin's complete security in a fully decentralized and permissionless manner. Without compromising the trust model, it expands BTC from a currency to a smart contract platform.

From a participation perspective: you can directly stake assets on the Hemi Network official platform (invitation code 9c3fd156), or provide liquidity via ecosystems like Spectra (BTC annualized 4%) and DEMOS to achieve higher multiples. Hemi will also provide legendary-level NFT airdrops for the top 50 stakers in each selected liquidity pool.

If you have no spare funds, you can actively participate in community content creation. Although there is currently no Kaito content leaderboard, the official account gives away a dozen NFTs weekly to outstanding content creators on Twitter, with opportunities to win without needing to stake. Additionally, if there are future launches, there will be retroactive benefits, so you can participate in advance to avoid missing out later when everyone else is competing and you are left feeling frustrated.

You can register with a Google email at @SpheronFDN

http://tge.spheron.network

Community code XHDAOSPON

Coming soon…

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany secretly signed the Non-Aggression Pact, in which Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied by the Soviet Union.

Fifty years later on this day, to draw the world's attention to the shared historical experiences of the three countries, over 2 million people from the three nations held hands, forming a human chain over 675 kilometers long, crossing the Baltic States.

At that time, the internet was still a rarity, and the protest movement relied entirely on village radio stations for coordination. The demonstrations were broadcast on television worldwide, and soon the three countries gained independence from Soviet control two years later.

Just connecting people together, how much power can it generate? When the consensus of millions is expressed, there is no need for financial capital or violent conflict; it can still have a tremendous influence, even affecting the fate of nations.

In the current cryptocurrency space, many projects are adopting the POS model, where the more money you have, the more rewards you receive, making the poor poorer and the rich richer, concentrating chips more and more, forgetting the original intention of BTC's POW, and overlooking the power of individuals themselves.

The same goes for DePIN projects; currently, many DePIN projects simply connect devices and call it a day. This method obviously has little competitiveness against traditional cloud service providers and computing power leasing platforms. After all, if you lack recognition, acquiring customers is often limited to within the circle, which may even lead to idle waste of computing power.

Currently, I believe @ICN_Protocol is performing well; last year ICN already made its mark in web2, currently having over a thousand paying enterprise clients and an annual revenue exceeding $5 million, which is the 'grounded business model' that all exchanges are eager to pursue.

In web3, unlike Filecoin/Arweave, which only focus on storage, and Akash, which only does computing power, Aethir focuses on isolated DePIN competitors. ICN's mainnet will simultaneously support storage, computing, and networking functions, integrating these three major services into one protocol with every user in the community acting as a node.

Recently, in the India-Pakistan conflict, Pakistan's use of a complete set of China's previous generation weapons to shoot down Indian aircraft/drone components purchased at a high price clearly illustrates that, in the face of a complete system, it is possible to battle across levels.

On the ICN mainnet, developers do not need to bear the learning and usage costs of multiple component protocols; they only need to connect to ICN to utilize a complete set of standardized infrastructure systems.

To fully leverage the advantages of the community, each user can act as a super node to verify the integrity of hardware resources and services, ensuring the decentralization and seamless operation of the ICN cloud network through the joint efforts of the global community, while both the community and hardware providers can earn fair rewards, truly returning data power to the users.

Today, ICN has opened node staking and will gradually open community-distributed hardware in phases in the future, allowing developers to build projects on ICN.

A fully decentralized infrastructure is steadily advancing along the roadmap, and the days of centralized internet applications facing single points of failure due to infrastructure issues like AWS may soon become a thing of the past.

Large companies working on public blockchain projects generally have better resources. For example, a few years ago, Facebook (Meta) published the Libra (Diem) white paper, but later faced significant regulatory resistance, leading core team members to leave and create SUI and Apt, two mainstream chains.

Just last year, Alex Zhang, one of the 13 janitors at Alibaba's Damo Academy, after serving as the CTO of AntChain and the CEO of Ant Group's development platform ZAN, formed the @pharos_network team to enter the high-performance public blockchain space.

Unlike the common scenario where employees start their own businesses, Pharos publicly announced its exclusive partnership with Ant Group during its financing and development stages, making Alex's close ties with Alibaba clear. Pharos aims to address issues that the consortium chain AntChain cannot solve due to compliance constraints, such as the marketization of RWA assets.

After reviewing the information currently disclosed by Pharos, I estimate that this year another public blockchain from a large company with a market value of tens to hundreds of billions will emerge. Its characteristics can be summarized as being fast, good, and cost-effective, which I'd like to share with you.

More: Currently, Pharos has secured commitments for nearly 300 million RWA assets, which translates to user revenues in the tens of millions annually. Coupled with its exclusive partnership with Ant Group and the backing of leading institutions like HackVC, such orders will continue to flow in.

It's important to note that even without external enterprises onboarding, the collaboration with AntChain itself signifies a substantial amount of already on-chain user assets.

In addition to CEO Alex being the CTO of AntChain, CTO Wishlonger is also the Chief Security Officer for Ant's Web3 operations. They previously led the trusted on-chain technology, which has been widely applied in new energy sectors such as new energy vehicles, batteries, and photovoltaic panels, accumulating over 12 million devices on-chain.

Fast: Thanks to the team's long-term technical accumulation from advancing business in Ant Blockchain for 7 years, Pharos achieved extremely high EVM Layer-1 performance in less than a year of development, with 20K TPS already validated on the public development network, and there will be further improvements. It took only two months to transition from the development network to today’s open user testing network without delays.

In addition to block generation speed and development progress, it is commendable that Pharos and AntChain have significantly open-sourced the DTVM virtual machine, increasing the code execution speed across the industry by 20 to 30 times, with smart contract call latency as low as 0.93ms, allowing applications like RWA, DeFi, AI, etc., to run on-chain with the feel of the internet.

Good: Simply put, for users, the best projects are those that can make money.

This year, under the shadow of VC coin valuation restructuring and Alpha points, many people are apprehensive about airdrop interactions.

However, I believe Pharos has little to worry about; on one hand, it is strong and hasn't taken too much VC funding, more so seeking partnerships to gain web3 endorsements, keeping its chips in hand with room for distribution.

On the other hand, the team has localized expertise by assigning the most professional people, such as CMO Laura, who previously managed the Solana Saga phone, surely well-versed in the allure of airdrops driven by the 'wealth effect' for users.

Save: While it may not matter for single transactions, in the long-term high-frequency usage scenario, TPS/Gas cost-effectiveness will become an important cost issue.

The older generation of TRX/ETH/BNB needs no further mention; individual users feel the pinch, while Pharos=500000K/1¢ is a truly suitable choice for enterprise-level users, significantly more economical than high-performance competitors (MegaETH=1000K/1¢, Monad=60K/1¢).

Finally, a small interactive note.

If you are interested in experiencing the Pharos test network (