💰 Reddit Is Bullish BTC and ETH?

In today’s edition: 🔍 STRK revised unlock schedule, 🏛️ Kraken's SEC dismissal bid, 📉 ECB's Bitcoin skepticism, 🔝 $100M into Eigen Labs, 📈 BTC's global price highs, and more!

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Union is the first sovereign interoperability layer pioneering trustless bridging between appchains, L1s, and L2s without depending on trusted third parties, oracles, multi-signatures, or MPC. Looking to future-proof blockchain bridging, it is the only protocol that fully addresses the sovereign bridging trilemma, unlocking a horizontally-scaled future.

What’s Poppin’?

by Sam Sriram, Brandy Betz, and Sage Young

Reddit’s S-1 filing, which also revealed that the social media giant acquired some MATIC, is a step forward for the company’s plans to become a publicly-traded company. 

StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said the shift to a “more gradual” STRK token release schedule for early contributors and investors came after listening to concerns from the community about the team’s long-term alignment with the Starknet ecosystem.

Crypto exchange Kraken seeks to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the SEC last year, which alleged the crypto exchange operated as an unregistered broker, and commingled customer and corporate funds.

The two European Central Bank (ECB) officials previously wrote in November 2022 that bitcoin was on “the road to irrelevance.”

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested $100 million into Eigen Labs, the software development firm behind Eigen Layer, while Binance Labs invested an undisclosed amount into Renzo, a liquid derivative platform on EigenLayer.

The countries setting all-time high bitcoin (BTC) prices in local currencies include Argentina, Egypt, and Japan, notes venture investor Balaji Srinivasan.

Fifteen years after the birth of Bitcoin, the network is now entering an era of remarkable innovation and change, according to Stacks’ co-creator Muneeb Ali.

On this episode of Unchained recorded at the Bitcoin Builders conference, Muneeb explores the complexities and advancements within Bitcoin’s layer 1 and layer 2. He shares his perspectives on what’s fueling innovation in Bitcoin’s layer 1 and discusses the implications of Ordinal Inscriptions amid criticism of it by core developers.

He delves into the various scaling solutions within Bitcoin, highlighting how trust assumptions vary among them, and how BitVM could be a ‘game changer’. He goes over the advantages of integrating smart contracts on Bitcoin, and why he considers bitcoin (BTC) the only true form of monetary asset.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Or watch it on YouTube.

Daily Bits…✍️✍️✍️

  • ⚖️ FTX, amid bankruptcy proceedings, received court approval to sell its 7.84% stake in AI startup Anthropic, valued at $1 billion, originally acquired through a $500 million investment.

  • 💵 Block, a fintech firm led by Jack Dorsey, reported a 37% year-on-year increase in bitcoin sales to $2.52 billion in Q4, with Cash App’s bitcoin sales gross profit up by 90%.

  • 🔐 Jeffrey Zirlin, Sky Mavis co-founder, was hacked on his personal Ethereum wallets, leading to a loss of approximately $9.7 million in ether (ETH).

  • 🇺🇸 Former U.S. President Donald Trump acknowledged bitcoin's significant growth and suggested the likelihood of needing regulatory measures for the cryptocurrency.

  • 🔗 Injective introduced the CW-404 standard, aiming to enhance fractional ownership of NFTs and expand financial use cases, leveraging the momentum around the ERC-404 token standard.

  • 🦄 Uniswap used Ethereum Name Service to introduce 'uni.eth' subdomains, allowing users to convert Ethereum addresses into user-friendly names, available for free claim as well as gasless name changes.

  • 🔄 DeFi startup Euler Finance announced Euler v2, a revamped lending platform with enhanced flexibility and security features, set to launch in Q2.

Today in Crypto Adoption...

  • 🐧 Pudgy Penguins partnered with Unstoppable Domains to launch the .pudgy domain, aiming to integrate it with digital wallets. It has also recently expanded its retail presence in Walmart stores.

The $$$ Corner…

  • 💡 Solana developer platform Helius secured $9.5 million in Series A funding, led by Foundation Capital, to expand its team and technology offerings.

What Do You Meme?

Recommended Reads

by David Z. Morris

The widely-followed FDV measure inherently distorts our sense of crypto projects’ values, particularly in the wake of an initial sale, and in some cases can even create systemic financial risk.

📈 Your Market Update 📉

  • BTC is down .7%, trading at $51,189

  • ETH is down 1.6%, trading at $2,943

  • BTC dominance: 48.94%

  • Crypto market cap: $2.05T

*All data as of today, 06:07 am ET. Source: CoinGecko

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