One. Prospect
1. Macro level summary and future forecast
United States' consumer price index (CPI) rose 2.4% year-on-year in September, hitting a three-and-a-half-year low, but the figure was still higher than market expectations. The Fed is expected to maintain an accommodative monetary policy and does not rule out further interest rate cuts to boost economic growth. As inflationary pressures ease, policymakers are likely to focus more on measures to support employment and promote a full recovery.
2. Market changes and early warnings in the crypto industry
Despite the release of key CPI data this week, an economic indicator that usually has a significant impact on financial markets, the cryptocurrency market does not seem to have been significantly affected and continues to maintain a slightly volatile trend. Bitcoin, the leader of the cryptocurrency market, has a relatively narrow range of price fluctuations, oscillating back and forth between $60,000 and $63,000, showing the hesitation of market participants in this price range. This volatility reflects the wait-and-see attitude of investors about the future market movements, and they are looking for more signals such as economic data, policy developments or industry news to base their investment decisions.
3. Industry and track hotspots
CARV protocol, dedicated to the modular data layer of Web3 games + AI, has received more than $50 million in financing, CARV promotes the development of games and AI by connecting real-world data assets to the blockchain, while ensuring data ownership, privacy and monetization, providing services for more than 900 companies and attracting more than 920,000 users to join;
The meme coin market is active, TERMINUS leads the "Mars tide", and Musk's influence once again promotes the explosion of meme concept coins. The MOODENG project became a hit on Solana, with a market capitalization of more than $200 million. However, the meme coin, driven by market sentiment, faces downside risks after short-term speculation, and the current market focus is mostly on the Ethereum chain;
Pipe Network closed a $10 million funding round to launch a decentralized CDN that aims to improve the content delivery network, reduce latency, and improve security. Pipe Network's strategy is to provide better services for modern Internet needs through a distributed network of nodes;
Coinbase launched cbBTC, which quickly became the third-largest encapsulated Bitcoin, but caused market concerns due to its asset transparency issues. The launch of cbBTC complemented the market demand for encapsulated Bitcoin, but the controversy in its terms of service and the issue of reserve transparency became the focus of the market.
Two. Market hotspots and potential projects of the week
1. Hot track performance
1.1. CARV, the hero of Web3 gaming + AI, has attracted more than $50 million in financing
The CARV protocol, a modular data layer for gaming and artificial intelligence, has revolutionized the way data is used and shared, ensuring that privacy, ownership, and control are firmly in the hands of individuals, ushering in a future where data creates value for all.
According to the current disclosure, CARV has completed multiple rounds of financing, attracting a total of more than $50 million in financing, which is a large amount no matter which track it is placed in Web3. CARV's fundraising lineup is even more valuable: it has attracted the support of a number of crypto VCs, including Tribe Capital, IOSG, ConsenSys (Metamask), and HashKey Capital, as well as Web2 giants such as Alibaba.
Features and benefits of CARV:
Connect real-world data assets to the blockchain: Seamlessly connect the Web3 ecosystem and the Web2 space to enhance the user experience. Connect off-chain data with on-chain smart contracts to enable interaction of real-world events.
Empower games and AI with ethical data sharing: Enhance game targeting, attribution, and user insights with comprehensive first- and zero-party data. Drive AI with large volumes of high-quality, trainable data, combined with human feedback, to ensure compliance and trust.
True Data Ownership, Privacy, and Monetization: Integrate siloed data from Web2 and Web3 on the basis of user consent to create a comprehensive personal data landscape. Monetize consent-based sharing and protect identity and data integrity with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) encryption.
summary
The modularity of the CARV protocol enables more than 900 Web2 and Web3 gaming and AI companies (e.g., Electronic Arts, Netstone Games, Alibaba Cloud) to use data as a commodity to meet their unique business needs, from NPC training to user understanding to Sybil attack prevention mechanisms. More than 920,000 people have joined the "Lifetime Passive Income Membership" through CARV ID (ERC7231 standard NFT). Its decentralized confidential computing layer ensures privacy protection, compliance policies, and value redistribution for data contributors and owners, making it possible to benefit millions or even tens of millions of users in the future.
1.2. Musk detonated the meme again, and the major meme concepts started the relay mode
Recently, TERMINUS has led the explosion of "Martian Tide" meme coins. Last Saturday, with the "joining" of Chinese crypto KOL and SHIB community OG Li Ping, the Meme coin project with Musk's description of "the first city of human future landing on Mars" TERMINUS as the ID became the focus of the market after the completion of the CTO (community takeover).
Project Introduction: The project contract was created 39 days ago, and the token ID was taken from the name of the first Martian city built by SpaceX after SpaceX's future landing on Mars, which Musk previously mentioned. In addition, according to community members, Musk quoted the concept proposed by the famous science fiction writer Asimov in the "Base" series as early as February 2020, and regarded TERMINUS as a new highland for mankind.
A few days later, Moo Deng, a small dwarf hippopotamus from Thailand, became a global hit overnight and quickly became a meme-maker. This new international influencer has led to the full flowering of the hippo economy, and crypto investors have also started fancy gold panning, and even reproduced the zoo market, among which Moo Den (MOODENG) on Solana is undoubtedly the most popular.
According to DEX Screener data, MOODENG has increased by more than 28,000 times in just over half a month since its establishment, and now has a market capitalization of more than $200 million, making it the seventh largest MEME in Solana's market capitalization.
summary
At present, most projects have unexpectedly begun to "fall and fall" after a wave of short-term emotional hype. From the performance of these projects, it can also be confirmed once again that the meme coin is more of a reflection of market sentiment, and it is necessary to constantly urge the beating and fueling of emotions, so as to introduce more liquidity to join this emotional feast, so that the spread scope and influence of a project can gradually expand.
In addition, perhaps the performance of the Ethereum ecosystem and Meme coin projects has begun to pick up recently, and most of the projects with better performance this time are concentrated on the Ethereum chain, of course, whether it is related to the Fomo sentiment instigated by the core developers of Ethereum recently for the purpose of saving Ethereum.
1.3. Pipe: The pioneer of DCD networking, bringing a new era of content delivery
近日，内容交付网络 Pipe Network 完成 1000 万美元融资，Multicoin 领投， Solana Ventures、Robot Ventures 以及 Anatoly Yakovenko 等参投。
At its core, Pipe Network is a decentralized CDN built specifically to meet the needs of the modern internet. Unlike centralized CDNs, which rely on a handful of large data centers to serve a global audience, Pipe Network uses a permissionless distributed network of nodes to decentralize content delivery. These nodes are run by carriers around the world, creating robust and scalable systems that can adapt to traffic demands in real-time.
Pipe Network provides a secure, permissionless infrastructure capable of delivering ultra-low-latency content delivery, supporting scalable growth, and ensuring seamless operations. The network is hardened by Solana to ensure Sybil attack defense and ensure the security and reliability of the network. The centralization of traditional CDNs comes with a variety of risks. A single point of failure can disrupt content delivery, while the high operational costs of running a large data center are passed on to customers. In addition, centralized systems often struggle to quickly adapt to changes in traffic, leading to performance bottlenecks during peak usage periods.
Pipe Network's decentralized approach solves the problem by creating a permissionless, distributed network where anyone can run a node. This expands the number of PoP nodes, reduces latency, and ensures better redundancy. By allowing more participants to join the network, Pipe Network can handle traffic spikes and ensure content delivery, even during unexpected network outages.
Summary:
One of Pipe Network's core strengths is its ability to deploy hyper-local access points (PoPs). These nodes are strategically placed close to end users to reduce latency and ensure that content is delivered quickly and efficiently. And Pipe provides built-in DDoS protection to protect endpoints from malicious attacks. With decentralized infrastructure, the risk of network-wide outages is greatly reduced as the network is resilient to a single point of failure.
1.4. Coinbase entered the market to encapsulate Bitcoin, and its cbBTC caused market concerns due to asset transparency issues.
There are a number of WBTC competitors in the market, the most notable of which is cbBTC, which is backed by Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in United States. In less than two weeks after its launch, cbBTC jumped to the third-largest encapsulated bitcoin, but at the same time it is causing concerns due to asset transparency issues.
Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC), backed by 1:1 BTC, will run on both the Ethereum mainnet and Base.
In terms of market share, Dune data shows that as of September 23, cbBTC tied for third place with BBTC with a share of 1.2%, and there is still a long gap between WBTC (68.5%) and BTCB (26.6%).
In the middle of this month, cbBTC was questioned for its lack of transparency in Bitcoin reserves just days after its launch. Soon after, cbBTC had another dispute over the terms of service, and some community users said that cbBTC's user terms stated that if bitcoin is lost due to malicious activities or unforeseen events, Coinbase will not compensate customers in full, but will distribute it to customers according to the proportion of remaining bitcoins.
Summary:
Almost every cross-chain bridge, including WBTC, provides Proof of Reserves (PoR) so that users can check if the issued token has sufficient backing. However, Coinbase didn't do that, and cbBTC fell well below par in terms of transparency. In terms of user asset protection, WBTC is different from cbBTC, the former issuer BitGo provides up to $250 million in on-chain insurance funds, while cbBTC does not provide any financial protection, and the existence of asset reserves is not transparent. Of course, if the BTC reserves of its exchange are used as vault support, it seems that Coinbase is the only way out at present, but the consequence of this is to expose the real hole cards, and whether Coinbase's BTC reserves can support the lock-up of encapsulated assets after minting and the normal deposit and withdrawal needs of the exchange will be marked with a big question mark.
2. Inventory of potential projects of the week
2.1. Vana: An L1 protocol that "AI" user data and generate revenue
Brief introduction
Vana transforms data into tokens, powering the development of decentralized AI. It is an L1 blockchain designed for private user data, allowing users to co-own, manage, and benefit from AI models trained on their data.
At its core, Vana is a data liquidity network. By solving the problem of dual consumption of data, it makes data flowing, ensuring that data can be used as flexibly and modularly as a financial asset. This is achieved through two mechanisms:
1. Proof of Contribution: Verify the value of private data in a privacy-preserving manner.
2. Unmanaged data: Ensure that data is only used for approved actions.
These mechanisms create a trustless environment where data can be securely tokenized, traded, and used for AI training without hindering user privacy or control. This paradigm shift not only democratizes AI development, but also introduces a new economic model that makes data contributors active stakeholders in the AI value chain.
Core Concept
Vana consists of a data liquidity layer and an application layer (i.e., a data portability layer) that aims to bring data on-chain as a transferable digital asset and support user-owned data applications based on verified data. The Universal Connector is a permissionless, real-time map of data flow.
Data liquidity layer
Centralized, pooled data is more valuable than separate data because it can be used as AI training data. The data liquidity layer facilitates the contribution, validation, and recording of data into the Data Liquidity Pool (DLP) through smart contracts.
DLP creators set specific goals, including purpose, verification method, and contribution parameters. Data contributors and custodians submit data for verification and receive governance rights and rewards based on the parameters of the DLP. Its main goal is to bring data on-chain and enable transactions between data contributors, custodians, and validators, thereby organizing data collection and management within the ecosystem and improving accessibility for users and developers.
Data liquidity pools
Data Liquidity Pools (DLPs) aggregate similar types of data submitted by data contributors and custodians. Each DLP is an independent peer-to-peer network that uses DLP validators to ensure data integrity through Vana's attestation system. DLPs provide trustless, private, and attributable data liquidity pools that allow users and developers to:
● Manage the use of their data in model training and application development.
● Build community-focused applications on Vana's application layer.
● Sell data liquidity access to data consumers for model training.
Data portability layer
The data portability layer (or application layer) is a space where data contributors and developers collaborate to build applications that use data from DLPs. It provides the infrastructure to train user-owned models and develop AI decentralized applications (dApps). This layer serves as a hub that enables online communities and developers to create economic value from data and facilitate the development of an interactive ecosystem. Data contributors can benefit from the network effects and value generated by the intelligence generated by their data.
Connectors
A connector is a decentralized ledger that records real-time data transactions in the Vana ecosystem using proof-of-stake consensus. It ensures efficient DLP token transfers and enables cross-DLP data access for user-owned applications. These transactions can be viewed and monitored by external parties. The Nexus is EVM compatible, allowing interoperability with other EVM networks, protocols, and DeFi applications.
conclusion
Vana's core strengths are:
Data transactions
Data is transacted by converting it into a digital asset, allowing it to flow securely across the network. Each data entry is recorded on the blockchain, ensuring transparency and traceability.
Proof of contribution
The Proof of Contribution system verifies the authenticity and value of data, protecting user privacy while ensuring that only verified data makes it to DLP.
Incentives
To facilitate data mobility and security, DLP creators and communicators receive financial rewards and governance rights, which incentivize them to actively participate in the development of the network.
Governance mechanisms
VANA holders can influence key decisions through voting, ensuring transparency and participation in the network, and enhancing the community's sense of responsibility and belonging.
VANA addresses the most essential needs of Web3 users, that is, the ability to monetize private data, and the ability to balance the interests of the B-side and the C-side, which is a necessary condition for a mature decentralized protocol to develop and grow.
2.2. Bittensor, a decentralized AI model market, holds more than 12% of the Tokens in the AI sector
Brief introduction
Bittensor is an open-source platform on which users can produce unique digital goods. These digital goods can take many forms such as AI, storage space, computing power, financial market predictions, and more. When users produce the best digital goods, they will be rewarded with TAO.
Here's a view of the Bittensor ecosystem.
Each digital goods category is produced in a different subnet. Build applications based on these specific subnets through which end users will be served.
Subnets exist outside of the blockchain and are connected to it, competing off-chain, where only the best producers are rewarded. Each subnet is made up of off-chain subnet validators, who initiate competition for a particular digital good, and off-chain subnet miners, who compete and respond by producing the best quality digital goods.
Assign scores to top-level subnet miners and subnet validators. The on-chain Yuma consensus determines the TAO rewards for these top performers. The Bittensor blockchain is called a subtensor and runs on decentralized validator nodes, similar to any blockchain.
For example, in Subnet 1, miners compete to generate answers that are closest to the machine learning base model chosen by the subnet validators.
The Opentensor Foundation provides all open-source tools, codebases, and documentation, complete with step-by-step tutorials and guides to help users participate in the Bittensor ecosystem.
conclusion
As Grayscale's first AI-themed token, it has great potential. As a project that can fully open the development of AI systems, it is of great significance to the industry, and whether every link of AI models to application can be exposed to every C-end and B-end user is the core of whether Web3 can surpass Web2 and become a new-generation network system. Therefore, Bittensor uses the unique economic incentive system of blockchain technology to promote global users to contribute their own AI products, and the efficient combination of the off-chain part and the security and decentralization of the on-chain part makes it an inspiration for AI to enter the general public, but whether the final economic incentive and the user's contribution to AI can form a positive flywheel remains to be evaluated after the project is launched.
2.3. Sui: 2024 Latent New Generation Layer 1
Brief introduction
The Sui platform is built on top of Sui Move. Sui Move is a further optimization of Move, taking advantage of the security and flexibility of Move, and enhancing it in a targeted manner, resulting in a significant increase in throughput, reduced finalization latency, and making Sui Move easier to program, and very scalable while keeping gas fees low.
Technical analysis
Sui上的Move
Evolving from the origins of the Diem project to the present day, Move takes on a modern form in Sui, providing a "win-win abstraction" that enhances both the programmer's expressive ability and the efficiency of the execution layer. The object data model improves security and supports extensions. Developers can intuitively use objects throughout the development stack as a natural representation of the Web3 building blocks. With unmatched flexibility to combine functions and create rich object hierarchies, Move on Sui enables creativity, experimentation, and developer experience to be at an all-time high.
Implementing parallel processing, Sui abandons the full-order consensus of many transactions, while other blockchains always order them completely. Causal ordering transactions allow Sui to execute many transactions in parallel at a large scale; This reduces latency and allows validators to take full advantage of all their CPU cores. Parallel processing enables simple transactions to be completed in real time without sacrificing security.
Sui pushes complexity to the edge: there are many protocol steps involved in the client. This minimizes interaction between validators, making the code simpler and more efficient. Sui has always been able to offload most of the client workloads to the Sui gateway service, resulting in a better user experience. In contrast, traditional blockchains follow a "shoot and forget" model, where clients need to monitor the state of the blockchain to assess whether their transaction submissions are successful.
No waiting, significantly reducing latency: Sui runs at network speed, so there's no need to wait for system timeouts between protocol steps. This can significantly reduce latency when the network is healthy and unattacked. In contrast, many traditional blockchains, including most proof-of-work blockchains, need to wait for a predefined timeout before committing a transaction in order to be secure.
Performance levels are scalable and gas fees are low, and it can boost its performance with more machines per validator. Traditional blockchains are typically designed to run on a single machine (or even a single CPU) for each validator. At the same time, this expansion does not increase gas fees, which means that when the Sui network transaction volume surges, Sui scales performance and keeps gas fees extremely low.
Project Status
In 2024, several significant developments have fueled Sui's rapid rise:
Grayscale's SUI Trust: Grayscale, the world's largest crypto asset manager, launched a trust fund set up specifically for Sui in August 2024 to enable accredited investors to invest in the token. The move has attracted a large number of institutional investors, with more than $2.5 million already invested in the trust. The support of heavyweights like Grayscale has made Sui more legitimized and recognized among investors and the crypto community.
Sui's foray into Web3 and gaming: To seize the opportunity of combining blockchain and gaming, Sui launched SuiPlay0X1, a Web3-native handheld gaming device developed in collaboration with Playtron. This move, similar to Solana's exploration of Web3 hardware, further solidifies Sui's leading position in the crypto gaming space, which is expected to see explosive growth in the coming years.
Integration of native USDC: In September 2024, Circle introduced native USDC on the Sui blockchain, greatly enhancing its DeFi capabilities. The addition of USDC as one of the most stable cryptocurrencies has propelled Sui's total value locked (TVL) to over $1.12 billion, making it among the top 10 blockchains in TVL.
Cross-chain expansion to Ethereum: At the end of September, Sui launched a cross-chain bridge with Ethereum, enabling seamless transfers of ETH and WETH between the two blockchains. This move significantly improves Sui's interoperability and addresses the market's demand for an efficient cross-chain bridge, surpassing the previous Wormhole solution.
summary
Sui's excellent scalability and innovative infrastructure make it a strong competitive force in the Layer 1 space. However, the crypto space has always been volatile, and Sui needs to continue innovating to maintain the current momentum.
At present, Sui has firmly established himself as one of the most noteworthy projects. Driven by institutional support, gaming, DeFi, and cross-chain interoperability, Sui's ecosystem is rapidly expanding and attracting the attention of developers and investors. This creates the prerequisites for Sui to be the most formidable opponent to compete with Ethereum and Solana in the future.
3. Industry data analysis
1. Overall market performance
1.1 现货BTC+ETH ETF
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Except for the combined net inflow of BTC and ETH on October 11, ETFs were in a net outflow trend for most of last week, with an important node on the 8th, with a single-day net outflow of $9.409 million from Grayscale ETF GBTC, and the largest single-day net inflow of Bitcoin spot ETF was BlackRock ETF IBIT, with a single-day net inflow of $39.5678 million.
For ETH ETFs, the important node is that on the 10th, the Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF ETHE had a single-day net outflow of $10.3684 million, and the Ethereum spot ETF with the largest single-day net inflow was BlackRock ETF ETHA, with a single-day net inflow of $17.8493 million.
On the 11th, the ETF market ushered in a buying wave, with a total net inflow of $253.5 million, Fidelity's FBTC was the main force to buy, and ARK also bought more than $90 million of BTC after a week of silence, according to the current market analysis, major ETFs generally choose to buy in the BTC59000~60000 range, but usually sell in the 62000~64000 range, so the price has always hovered in these two buying and selling ranges.
1.2. 现货BTC vs ETH 价格走势
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The crypto market came to an abrupt halt near $66,000 after the Fed's "continued interest rate cuts" on November Golden Week had not yet been digested by the strong non-farm payrolls data for September. However, judging from the current bullish strength, the bullish sentiment has not been completely suppressed by the fundamentals, but the ETF's buying behavior in the range of $59,000~$60,000 means that the strong support of the range is still the market consensus. The market is still at the beginning of the interest rate cut cycle, but the strength and intensity of this interest rate cut cycle are definitely much weaker than during the epidemic, so there is a high probability that a V-shaped rebound similar to that year will not appear, and the liquidity in the field is not so optimistic, but the slow liquidity release is still a ray of light in the darkness, whether it is BTC or ETH, the choice of spot layout in the current range is relatively low-risk.
1.3. Panic & Greed Index
This week, the Panic and Greed Index continued to rise to near 50, and remained neutral for 5 days of the week, and only 2 days in fear, this data change reflects that although the fundamentals have reservations about the strength of liquidity release, the start of the interest rate cut cycle has become the consensus of the market, and slow and rapid rate cuts will not have a substantial impact on bullish sentiment, so the sentiment next week is still inclined to neutral range.
2. Public chain data
2.1. BTC Layer 2 Summary
In terms of BTC ecology, Bitlayer, Core and Rootstock occupy more than 50% of Layer 2's TVL, of which Bitlayer has just announced the completion of a $9 million Series A expansion round of financing, integrating the cross-chain interoperability protocol LayerZero, which enables it to achieve cross-chain interoperability with dozens of blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Arbitrum, as well as cross-chain information security and trustless delivery. Core, on the other hand, introduced the first-of-its-kind non-custodial Bitcoin staking, allowing Bitcoin holders to earn without giving up custody, setting up a Bitcoin risk-free rate and putting its TVL in the lead. However, due to the tepid ecology of Merlin and BSquared, TVL has never been able to make a breakthrough due to the tepid ecosystem and the lack of incentive policies to attract developers and users.
2.2. EVM &non-EVM Layer 1 Summary
Last week, the overall TVL of the public chain was in a state of outflow, of which Solana and Ethereum fell by 26% and 34% respectively, and the reason may be related to the outbreak of the meme plate rotation, and the meme funds on these two chains are looking for new chains, so upstarts such as Sui, Base and Ton are expected to take over.
Tron and Binance Chain have been relatively stable over the past week, with TVL only down 10%. Next week's TVL performance may continue to depend on the selection of meme funds.
2.3. EVM Layer 2 Summary
In terms of L2, there was a rare lack of significant fluctuations in TVL last week, and L2 remained stable under the trend of L1 capital outflows, and the ZK protocol even maintained a slight positive growth. Judging from the on-chain trading activity last week, Base's overall performance was significantly poor, but the top 6 protocols achieved a rebound in trading activity over the weekend, but users need to pay attention to Blast's on-chain activity, which is currently in an extremely unstable state and should be guarded against unknown risks at any time.
2.4. RWA Summary
In terms of RWA, Maker has achieved positive TVL growth in a single week after a comprehensive product upgrade, and there is a continuous trend, which reflects that at least for the time being, the market has a high recognition of Maker's new products in terms of revenue, but users still need to maintain a cautious view of Maker before the hidden problems of decentralization are exposed. As for Solv, the fundamentals are on the rise, first announcing the deployment of Avalanche, becoming the most cross-chain Bitcoin staking protocol in the current cross-chain ecosystem. Subsequently, it continued to cooperate with the public chain CoreDAO to launch a Bitcoin LST with real income: SolvBTC.Core. SolvBTC users can mint SolvBTC.Core to earn Core spot token yields, and at the same time, they can earn additional rewards by participating in other protocols in the Core ecosystem. This puts its TVL ahead of the second-ranked Lightning Network, which has a TVL of $310 million.
Four. Macro data review and key data release nodes for next week
According to the latest data, the consumer price index (CPI) in United States rose 2.4% year-on-year in September, the lowest level in three-and-a-half years, but still exceeded market expectations. Meanwhile, initial jobless claims unexpectedly surged to a 14-month high of 258,000, reflecting a weaker labor market. These data have sparked widespread concern about the future direction of the Fed's monetary policy.
Fed officials reacted mixed to the data, with some senior officials saying they were open to the upcoming November meeting and did not rule out the possibility of further rate cuts. Market expectations for a 25 basis point rate cut by the Fed in November rose to more than 80%, suggesting that investors generally believe that the Fed will continue to adopt loose monetary policy in response to the economic slowdown.
Important macro data nodes for this week (October 14-October 20) include:
October 15: United States New York Fed manufacturing index for October
October 16: United States Import Price Index for September
17 October: Eurozone CPI for September
5. Regulatory policies
This week's global regulatory actions are frequent, mainly reflected in the successive release of relevant reports by major international or regional organizations and the continued litigation of designated projects or platforms by the United States, indicating that regulatory organizations are detailing and in-depth understanding of the format and operation methods of the crypto industry, with a view to introducing a regulatory framework that meets the needs of regulatory awareness and industry development.
UN
On 7 October, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released a report titled "The Convergence of Transnational Organized Crime and Online Fraud, Underground Banking, and Technological Innovation in Southeast Asia: The Evolving Threat Landscape."
The latest report covers three main areas: an overview of developments in Southeast Asia, underground banking and money laundering, and technological innovations that facilitate criminal activities. Specifically, the report focuses on the characteristics and evolution of organized crime in Southeast Asia, particularly drug trafficking and money laundering activities associated with casinos and special economic zones; and a detailed analysis of the main threats and risks posed by the proliferation of casinos and the sophisticated money laundering methods employed by organized criminal groups, such as how the rise of online gambling and electronic gambling has changed the landscape of underground banking and money laundering; The report also provides a series of recommendations designed to assist governments and international partners to better address the rapid growth of casinos and organized crime in Southeast Asia.
European Union
A recent report released by the European Central Bank (ECB) delved into the performance of stablecoins in the face of changes in United States monetary policy, leading to a troubling conclusion: as the Fed raises interest rates and gradually tightens liquidity, stablecoins' market capitalization has declined significantly, showing great vulnerability. This not only challenges the common perception of stablecoins as a "stabilizing force" in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, but also sounds the alarm for Web3 companies that rely on stablecoins for capital reserves and payments.
United States
Crypto.com Received a Wells notice from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, on the 11th, according to the disclosure documents of the US SEC, it once again postponed its decision on Ethereum spot ETF options. The filing said a decision on the proposed rule change that would allow the Cboe exchange to list options related to several popular Ethereum spot ETFs, with the ruling deadline being pushed back from Oct. 19 to Dec. 3.
Hong Kong, China
The SFC issued an official circular pointing out that in the course of supervising licensed corporations engaged in the management of private funds and discretionary accounts, a number of deficiencies and non-compliance standards were discovered. Many of the cases involved serious misconduct, posing a significant threat to the interests of investors and undermining public confidence in the integrity of Hong Kong's market and its status as an international asset management centre. The cases set out in the circular cover a wide range of non-compliance situations, ranging from conflict of interest, risk management and investing within the scope of authority, provision of information to investors to valuation methods, and set out the existing obligations applicable to asset managers in such circumstances. The SFC noted that asset managers should review the concerns set out in the circular and take appropriate steps to rectify any deficiencies identified.