2023 Top 10 Events of the Year: Hong Kong, Binance, BlackRock ···

2023 is coming to an end, and the Web3 industry has inherited the impact of many thunderstorms from 2022, but it is still showing tenacious vitality, with many innovations and booms emerging.

"Learning from History" and reviewing the major events that have occurred in the Web3 industry in 2023 can not only define the development trajectory of the past year, but also indicate the possible future development direction. 2023 first ushered in the airdrop of BLUR and ARB in the "flat", in April, Ethereum successfully carried out the Shanghai upgrade, in the middle of the year, the good news continued in the middle of the year, Hong Kong officially implemented crypto-friendly policies, financial giants applied for Bitcoin spot ETFs one after another, Ripple and Grayscale defeated the US Securities and Exchange Commission twice in lawsuits, in October and November, the FTX trial and Binance's huge fines put crypto exchanges in the spotlight, and the year-end focus shifted to inscriptions and memes.

Here's a full recap of the top 10 events of 2023:

一、BLUR 掀起 2023 首个空投潮

The first major event in the cryptocurrency space of 2023 took place on February 15. On this day, the Blur platform distributed the first airdrops to its community members, totaling 360 million Blur tokens. Due to the large number of participating users, Blur's official website was paralyzed due to excessive traffic on the airdrop collection page, resulting in users being unable to access and receive the airdrop normally. It took more than half an hour after the launch for the issue to be resolved. At the same time, the Ethereum network's gas fees have skyrocketed to around 1,000 Gwei. According to data from the ultrasound.money website at the time, the contract operation to claim the Blur airdrop resulted in the burning of more than 980 ETH, which was the first in the entire network. However, after 10 months of launch, the token BLUR has not performed as expected, with a price of $0.65 at the time of listing in February and $0.51 at the time of writing.

Rising from the NFT boom in mid-2022, the Blur platform quickly stood out from many NFT marketplaces, even surpassing OpenSea, which has long held the market leader. As a result, there is a lot of anticipation for the emergence of a new NFT market leader in 2024. For example, due to the inscription boom recently, the trading volume of the OKX NFT Marketplace once surpassed that of OpenSea and Blur.

2. ARB airdrop is launched

Arbitrum's token airdrop on March 23 was one of the crypto industry's highest-profile events in March. Arbitrum as one of the most important Layer2 of Ethereum, many users compare ARB and OP, the price of ARB is $1.35, which is similar to the $1.4 when OP was launched last year, but the price of OP is $3.52 as of this writing, and the token price is better than ARB's $1.38.

3. Ethereum Shanghai upgrade

The Ethereum Shanghai upgrade on April 12 marks another milestone since the Ethereum Merge in September 2022. The Ethereum Merge is a key step in the network's transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, and one of the highlights of the Shanghai upgrade is to make ETH staked on the Ethereum Beacon Chain smart contract available for withdrawal, two years after the launch of staking on the Beacon Chain.

Prior to the Shanghai upgrade, there were widespread concerns about a possible ETH sell-off after the opening of staking. In fact, the first day after the upgrade was the highest single-day outflow of ETH staking, with a total of 14,249 validators withdrawing, and a month after the upgrade, a total of 48,341 validators withdrew, withdrawing 1.55 million ETH (worth $2.93 billion at the time), but it did not have a significant impact on the market price, and the net inflow of the staking pool remains positive to this day due to the high demand for Ethereum staking.

Next, Ethereum's most talked-about technical advancement will be sharding.

4. Hong Kong implements a virtual trading platform licensing system

The Hong Kong SAR Government has been vigorously developing Web3.0 since the issuance of the Virtual Asset Policy Statement on 31 October last year, and passed the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing (Amendment) Bill 2022 in December last year, which stipulates that the licensing regime for virtual asset service providers will come into effect on 1 June this year. This means that Hong Kong has officially brought virtual asset trading platforms into the scope of regulation, and platforms that want to provide such services in Hong Kong must apply for relevant licenses.

To date, 13 virtual asset trading platforms have submitted applications to the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, two trading platforms – HashKey Exchane and OSL Exchange – have been licensed, one has been rejected and 10 are still pending. Although there has been a fraud storm of JPEX on an unlicensed exchange, involving more than HK$1 billion.

In addition, Hong Kong has also launched its first Asian virtual currency futures ETF this year, and is exploring "e-HKD", tokenized assets are also in Hong Kong's potential development direction, after the Hong Kong Fintech Week in November, the three key directions of Hong Kong's Web 3.0 are retail investors, e-HKD and digital yuan, and stablecoins.

5. BlackRock applies for a Bitcoin spot ETF

U.S. financial giants and regulators have been back and forth for years over Bitcoin spot ETF applications, but Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager with about $9 trillion in assets under management, submitted a June 15 Bitcoin spot ETF application that was seen as proof of "institutional re-entry into the crypto market," pushing the price of Bitcoin from $25,000 to $30,000.

After BlackRock, asset management companies such as WisdomTree, Invesco, and Fidelity have submitted Bitcoin spot ETF applications again, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has repeatedly postponed the resolution as before, but with the loss of the SEC and grayscale lawsuits and the loosening of its own attitude, the 13 applicants currently applying for the application have held 24 meetings with the SEC to discuss ETF details, and January 5-10 next year is the deadline for the SEC to approve or not. Wall Street insiders predict that in order to maintain market fairness, it is likely that multiple ETFs will be approved at the same time.

6. Ripple won a phased victory in the SEC lawsuit

Ripple won a phased victory in a lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 13 this year, which began in December 2020, and the key to the lawsuit was to determine whether the $1.3 billion XRP sold by Ripple was a security or not, so the lawsuit was already of epoch-making significance for the crypto industry, and after three years of fierce battles, it was not until July 13 this year that a U.S. federal judge ruled that Ripple's sale of XRP tokens did not violate federal securities laws, arguing XRP falls short of securities standards in many ways. This is the first time that a U.S. judge has ruled in favor of Ripple and could set a precedent for future token classification cases, and the crypto community has boiled over as a result.

XRP price also rose from $0.47 to $0.82, the highest since January 2018. As a result of this ruling, several tokens that were previously identified as securities by the SEC in the SEC v. Coinbase case all rose in the event, such as SOL, MATIC, ADA, XLM, etc., all of which rose by double digits.

However, the judgment can only be regarded as a temporary victory for Ripple, and the SEC has appealed, and although its appeal was dismissed, the SEC may still try to appeal the entire case.

7. Grayscale wins the SEC lawsuit

More than a month after losing to Ripple, the SEC suffered another defeat in a lawsuit with Grayscale. GBTC, a bitcoin trust in Grayscale, has become the world's largest bitcoin investment trust, with more than 408,500 bitcoins, nearly 2% of the total number of bitcoins. Therefore, the victory of Grayscale is significant for the crypto industry.

On August 29, a U.S. federal court ruling gave Grayscale Investments LLC the victory in a lawsuit against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for refusing to apply for a Bitcoin spot ETF. The case stems from October 2021, when Grayscale first applied to convert its closed-end Bitcoin trust, GBTC, into a Bitcoin spot ETF, but was rejected by the SEC.

The judge ruled that the SEC's initial rejection of Grayscale's ETF application was "arbitrary and capricious", that the administrative agency must treat the administrative actions made equally, and that the logic of the approval of the Bitcoin futures ETF should be equal to the logic of the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF, otherwise all applications for the Bitcoin futures ETF should be revoked, and that the SEC allowed the trading of the Bitcoin futures ETF for the first time in 2021, and said that futures products are more difficult to manipulate, but the Bitcoin spot ETF has not been approved. Because Bitcoin is the only crypto asset that has been explicitly identified by the SEC as a non-security, and ETFs are regulatory-compliant financial products, there should be no barriers to applying for Bitcoin ETFs.

If BlackRock's Bitcoin spot ETF application is a good start to the application, Grayscale's victory can be considered an acceleration of the SEC's approval spree. Bitcoin also rose in response, breaking through the $27,000 and $28,000 mark. Prior to this, Bitcoin had fallen below the $26,000 mark several times, and its market capitalization had fallen below $500 billion. But the rally didn't last long, as the SEC delayed the approval of several Bitcoin spot ETFs within 48 hours of the ruling.

8. FTX bankruptcy case: SBF was convicted on seven counts

In late 2022, cryptocurrency exchange FTX announced that it had filed for bankruptcy, triggering a flurry in the crypto market. BlockFi, Genesis and many other crypto companies have gone bankrupt one after another, and the overall market capitalization of the crypto market has fallen sharply. As the case progresses, more details inside FTX are revealed. Ahead of SBF's trial, other FTX executives pleaded guilty one after another and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

In this shocking trial, the testimony of SBF's ex-girlfriend broke the news: she was instructed by SBF to commit a crime and embezzled about $14 billion of FTX customer funds, Alameda had bribed Chinese officials to unlock accounts, and under SBF's instructions, Alameda repeatedly falsified its balance sheet, FTX co-founder Gary Wang said that Alameda owed at least $8 billion in debt to FTX, and most of Alameda's investment was paid by FTX user funds. SBF also said that he was aware of Alameda's precarious situation, and that he had tried to shut down Alameda two months before the FTX crash.

A trial that wakes up the entire crypto world ends with SBF being convicted on seven counts and facing up to 115 years in prison, but of course the trial is not final, with SBF's second trial currently scheduled for March 11 next year and sentencing scheduled for March 28, 2024.

9. Binance turmoil: The regulatory hammer has fallen, and the industry reshuffle has accelerated

In June of this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) threw an iron fist at Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao and filed 13 charges that put Binance at the center of the maelstrom of public opinion, but the data shows that Binance's Bitcoin wallet balance has not changed dramatically in seven days.

On November 22, the dust finally settled on the U.S. Department of Justice's criminal investigation into Binance, and Binance will pay a fine of up to $4.3 billion to the U.S. Treasury, the highest settlement in history. At the same time, Changpeng Zhao stepped down as CEO of Binance. The crypto market fell, and Bitcoin fell below $36,000 at one point. But in this case, Binance's outflows were lower than expected, and the new CEO Richard Teng also said that Binance will follow a path of stability, growth, and compliance thereafter.

After the collapse of FTX and Binance, the cryptocurrency industry will face new challenges and opportunities, and the increased regulatory pressure will force cryptocurrency industry participants to strengthen their compliance awareness and self-construction. At the same time, the reshuffle of the cryptocurrency industry will also accelerate the concentration of the industry and bring new growth opportunities to leading companies. Coinbase is perhaps the most beneficiary crypto exchange and has become the custodian of BlackRock's crypto ETFs, which would bring a lot of benefits if next year's Bitcoin spot ETF is approved.

十、铭文和 Meme 热潮开启

At the end of 2023, the inscription and meme craze swept the entire cryptocurrency market.

Inscriptions, a technology for burning arbitrary content onto Bitcoin (BTC), first appeared in March 2023 when developers created BRC20 based on ERC20, giving Ordinals the ability to issue fungible assets. The inscription was tepid at first, because there were still some minting thresholds for Bitcoin inscriptions at the time, but with the introduction of proxy tools on platforms such as Unisat, the minting threshold was lowered and more users entered the market at an accelerated pace, until the price of ORDI rose alarmingly in November this year, bringing the so-called "summer of inscriptions".

The turning point came on December 6 of this year, when Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr said that Inscriptions "is using a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core's Bitcoin Core client to spam the blockchain, and said that the vulnerability will be fixed in a new version." This means that inscriptions such as ORDI may be restored in the new version and will no longer exist, and the community is divided between two opposing sides of the inscription for and against, but it does bring a new wave of enthusiasm to ORDI, and the price of ORDI once exceeded a new high of $68. In late December, the Bitcoin network even surpassed Ethereum in single-day transaction fees due to a large number of Ordinals transactions.

And with the explosion of Bitcoin inscriptions, a wave of inscriptions has gradually set off on various public chains, promoting the rise of tokens on various public chains. Among them, SOL led the way, breaking through $110, a 30-day increase of nearly 100%. In addition, with the spread of low gas events and active communities, the meme boom of the Solana ecosystem has begun, and meme, as one of the indispensable sectors to promote the market at the end of this year, various animal coins have emerged in an endless stream, and the market capitalization of WIF, LEIA, SILLY, etc. has risen nearly tenfold in the short term.

end

2023 is a year of Web3 recovery, with progress in regulation, technology, applications, and more. At the end of the year, the prices of mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum rose sharply, giving Web3er a satisfactory answer and laying the foundation for further development in 2024.

As Bill Gates' annual outlook puts it, "The road ahead will reach a turning point in 2024. 」