L2 · 3126

Ansem: Institutional funding is turning bullish on the crypto market. The current market environment may be conducive to bottom formation

Comparing news, well-known crypto KOL Ansem wrote that institutional funding is shifting towards bullish crypto markets, including billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller buying HYPE, Robinhood launching its own L2, and hedge fund giant Paul Tudor Jones increasing its Bitcoin position. At the same time, he pointed out that the regulatory environment in the crypto industry is improving significantly, while crypto native investors generally remain strongly bearish and pessimistic. Ansem believes that institutional funding is turning bullish and the regulatory environment is improving, while internal market sentiment is still extremely pessimistic. This combination forms a typical condition for the bottom of the market. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

3d agoburnking

Gnosis Chain's GIP-153 proposal to transform into Ethereum L2 has been approved

Comparatively, Gnosis Chain's GIP-153 proposal to transition from a sovereign independent L1 to a highly aligned Ethereum L2 has officially been approved. On the eve of the voting deadline, several official related addresses, including Gnosis co-founder StefandGeorge, voted in favor and successfully met the quorum (Quorum) requirement. The proposal was jointly initiated by Gnosis founder tw_tter and core members. It aims to free Gnosis Chain from the shortcomings of traditional PoS L1 security and inflation subsidies, directly inherit the security of Ethereum validators, and will be the first to achieve simultaneous composable Ethereum L2.

3d ago

Aligned announces Genesis airdrop details, accounting for 8.74% of total supply

In comparison, ZK Verification Layer Project Aligned announced Genesis Drop details. The airdrop allocated 8.74% of the total fixed supply of ALIGN of 10 billion units to the community supporting crypto, Ethereum, and ZK. TGE will unlock 44.36% of the total airdrop volume, accounting for about 3.88% of the total supply. The airdrop is divided into three parts. Airdrop 1 is distributed to the community and accounts for about 6.54% of the supply: those who receive 10,000 or less are fully unlocked at TGE; those with more than 10,000 are unlocked in full at TGE; TGE first unlocks 10,000 units, and the rest is released linearly over 12 months. Airdrop 2 was an outstanding contributor, accounting for 2.10%, covering Protocol Guild, L2BEAT, ZachXBT, and ZK Podcast. TGE unlocked only 2.08% of them, and the rest were linear for 47 months. ZK Arcade accounts for 0.10% and is fully unlocked at TGE. In terms of receipt rules, those allotted 10,000 ALIGN and below will receive them on the Base Chain, and those with more than 10,000 will receive them on Ethereum L1. Users can check eligibility and quota at community.alignedlayer.com.

3d ago

CEO of Etherealize warns of Wall Street Alliance chain revival: fragmenting the ecosystem will reduce blockchain interoperability

Comparing news, Vivek Raman, co-founder and CEO of Etherealize, who is supported by Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation, warned that Wall Street's renewed pursuit of private and licensed “alliance chains” is recreating a fragmented system, weakening the interoperability and liquidity that blockchain is supposed to bring, which is equivalent to “bottom to bottom competition.” He pointed out that the rise of gated networks such as Digital Asset's Canton Network, Circle's ARC, and Stripe's Tempo is similar to the reenactment of alliance chains such as R3 and Hyperledger back then, and organizations will eventually fall into a situation where they compete with each other and require permission or membership to participate. Raman emphasized that the Ethereum mainnet should be a globally open, permissionless basic layer similar to HTTP. Institutions can overlay licensing and privacy features at the application layer or L2 to achieve maximum interoperability and liquidity. Etherealize is committed to attracting TradFi to embrace Ethereum, a chain that already hosts billions of dollars in tokenized assets and supports a large number of DeFi settlements. The company received seed funding from Buterin and Foundation in January 2025, and completed Series A financing of 40 million US dollars in the same year. He cites BlackRock's new Ethereum-based fund as an example. After the regulations are clear, institutional funds prefer an open network track owned by no one; if they choose an affiliate chain, they need to pay for the alliance and be bound by its rules, and incentives for non-early members will quickly fade away. Christian Catalini, founder of MIT's Cryptoeconomics Laboratory, also pointed out that if current enterprise sales-oriented licensing networks become mainstream, some of the competitive benefits of blockchain may not be realized. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

7d agoburnking

Robinhood Chain is hot, but is it profitable?

Source: Blockworks Research Authors: Ryan Graham and Sam Schubert Compiled and organized: BitPushNews highlights The crypto business is getting cold: Although Robinhood's overall performance hit a record high, its crypto business is shrinking. Q2 Crypto business revenue fell 38% year over year to $100 million, accounting for only 8% of total revenue; retail crypto trading volume fell 36% year over year, and the share of crypto assets in total custodian assets (AUC) also fell to a record low of 7%. Robinhood Chain (Robinhood Chain) started strongly: Robinhood Chain had one of the strongest starts of the L2 expansion network in recent years, generating $3.6 million in real economic value (REV) in July, accounting for 38% of all L2 chain revenues counted by growthepie, surpassing mature networks such as Polygon and Base. Meme coins dominated early activity: Meme coins, not real world assets (RWA), drove Robinhood Chain's early activity. Meme coins accounted for 51% of July spot trading volume, while RWA only accounted for 5%; and 48% of RWA trading volume occurred in the “Meme Coin + RWA” liquidity pool. Monetization opportunities lie in the application layer: Robinhood's clearest monetization opportunities lie above the infrastructure layer. USDG has generated around $10.5 million in annualized interest income; Morpho has proven the great value of direct distribution of Robinhood's main app; while Lighter only uses the Robinhood Wallet (Robinhood Wallet) partnership, accounting for only 0.2% of its total perpetual contract trading volume. The company's overall performance has yet to be boosted: Robinhood Chain is currently unable to substantially improve Robinhood's underlying performance. Its total known annualized revenue is only $54.8 million, which is equivalent to only 14% of Robinhood's annualized crypto revenue. For the Robinhood Chain to have a real impact, Robinhood needs to scale up USDG, monetize access to main apps, or use the chain as a traffic entry point to introduce high-value products. Robinhood's crypto business at the crossroads is probably no company that has managed to capture the rise of retail investors as successfully as Robinhood. It has become synonymous with retail investment, and its underlying business is booming as a result. In the second quarter of 2026, Robinhood reported quarterly revenue of $1.31 billion (a record high), up 32% year over year and 92% from Q2 2024. This strong momentum comes not only from its core stock and options trading business, but also from its ever-expanding product matrix. Robinhood now has 13 different lines of business, each generating more than $100 million in annualized revenue. In fact, almost all transaction-based business lines experienced double-digit year-on-year growth in the second quarter... well, with one exception: cryptocurrencies. The crypto business, which once accounted for more than one-third of Robinhood's revenue, has now shrunk to the point where it's almost negligible for the company. In the second quarter of 2026, only 8% of Robinhood's quarterly revenue came from cryptocurrencies, the lowest share since the third quarter of 2023. The crypto business's share of Robinhood's revenue pie has declined so much that event contracts (event contracts), which were only launched last year, generated more revenue in the second quarter ($156 million) than the crypto business ($100 million). This weakness goes far beyond the crypto business's declining share of Robinhood's revenue. Overall, its core user base is losing interest in cryptocurrencies. While the reason behind it isn't unique to Robinhood, the extent of its weakness is shocking. This is particularly evident in trading activities. In the second quarter of 2026, retail crypto trading volume on the Robinhood App was just $182 billion, down 36% year over year, to record...

9d agoWendy#Robinhood #Robinhood Chain #RWA #Robin Hood chain

588 days, 300+ Web3 projects fall: who's still at the table?

Source: Foresight News Author: Eric Original title: In 588 days, 300+ Web3 projects sank into the deep sea and sailed a thousand sails by the side of a sinking ship, and the disease tree is ahead of time. On the way to prosperity, any industry must go through a round of “dead bodies are everywhere” of elimination, and Web3 is no exception. According to Foresight News's review of public information, since 2025, at least 78 Web3 projects with a total funding amount of more than 1.5 million US dollars have been announced to be shut down. Of these, 69 projects that can confirm the amount of financing have taken away more than 900 million US dollars in total. If you count the small projects that didn't get financing from institutions and died silently, the total number is far over 300. This means that over the past nearly 600 days, an average Web3 project died every two days, or was famous or unknown. Of the 75 projects counted by Foresight News, 37 were shut down throughout 2025, while 41 were shut down in just half of 2026, and 17 were shut down in a single quarter in the second quarter, setting the highest number in a single quarter since this round of clearance. The “hot” DappRadar, Zapper, and established exchanges including BitMEX and AscendEX (formerly BitMax) in the last round of the bull market have all put an end to their business careers in nearly two years. The reshuffle did not stop as the market picked up; on the contrary, it accelerated. After receiving millions of dollars or even tens of millions of dollars in financing, every team that has stepped into this new world has had the proud ambition of “laughing at the sky and going out. Are our generation people from Fenghao?” But after a few years of being baptized in the market, these cold and cruel numbers are still in front of everyone's eyes. Emerging markets are also markets, and Web3 isn't more gentle than other industries. “Not being able to support myself” is the number one “cause of death”. Looking at the “cause of death” of 75 projects, the first one ranked was “insufficient funding,” with 31 projects falling on this issue, accounting for more than 40%; followed by “insufficient market demand,” and 17 companies shut down as a result. The two added up are close to two-thirds of the total. In other words, the vast majority of projects die for only one reason: they have never been able to support themselves. The expressions used by these projects in the shutdown announcement are similar. Many of them say “after trying our best to find a path to sustainable development, we have not found a path to sustainable development.” The subtext of this sentence is: At the beginning of the project, there was actually no idea how to do it, or the initial idea was very different from the actual situation in the market. Some industry observers rated this wave of bankruptcy as “a direct reflection of the failure of the business model and the breakdown of the capital chain, rather than simply fluctuating market sentiment,” which can be described as hitting the head. The investment logic of the primary market has completely changed in the past two years. The first question investors meet is no longer “how much room do you have for imagination”, but “how to make money.” The first batch of projects whose revenue did not cover operating costs or tell a new story fell after the financing floodgates were tightened. The OSL Institute summarized this shift in its annual report as the industry moving from the “first half” to the “second half”: a growth model driven by rising asset prices and innovative agreements came to an end, and the market moved “from narrative to delivery.” To put it more bluntly, the market and capital are no longer willing to pay for “experiments,” and the project's self-hematopoietic ability has become a necessity. Compared to the reason they wanted to be clear, the five projects that announced that the “model is unsustainable” seemed much more honest. For example, Goldfinch, which made unsecured credit loans, lost blood and shut down due to continued bad loans to emerging market companies; the social game Fantasy.Top, which is a popular social game that relies on tokens to motivate, makes it difficult to sustain the incentive model after the popularity recedes. The “unsustainable model” is a very interesting reason for the collapse. Most unsecured credit loans in traditional financial markets are based on big data or personal past credit records to set reasonable limits. As an emerging “lending company,” Goldfinch dares to provide unsecured credit loans in emerging markets without credit data. This is not a problem that can be solved by cryptocurrency and Web3 alone. Obviously, the reason for the birth of this company with a total financing amount of nearly 40 million is hard to convince. I don't know how top institutions like a16z were fooled into entering the market. Additionally, some companies have died due to regulation. Mango Markets shut down through a community vote after reaching a settlement with the SEC...

10d ago22#WEB3

Some people use it, have brands, and don't issue coins. Why has POAP reached the end?

Author: imToken Original title: When POAP also comes to an end: When the “wave of bankruptcies” in the crypto industry hits, how can ordinary users cope with themselves? Recently, the crypto industry seems to have entered an intensive farewell period. From BitMEX, which has been in operation for 11 years, to Satori Finance, which has received investment from top institutions such as Polychain and Coinbase Venture, one familiar name after another has ceased operations and officially reached the end, covering various directions such as trading platforms, DeFi, wallets, NFTs, and infrastructure. Among them, POAP's departure was unquestionably particularly impressive. If you've gone through the previous crypto cycle, especially if you've participated in Devcon, ETHDenver, Hackathon, DAO community events, or various online and offline meetups, many people can probably pull out a few POAPs from their wallets. It may be from a conference, an online sharing, or just a community event where you can't remember the details. Most of these POAPs aren't worth much, but because of this, they're probably closer to the original meaning of “collecting” than many NFTs that used to be expensive. It is for this reason that POAP's farewell is particularly representative. It didn't suddenly go back to zero due to hacker attacks, and didn't even issue a native token that needed to continuously maintain price expectations. It just had real users, clear scenarios, and a high enough brand awareness, but in the end, it still hasn't found a business model that can support the company for a long time. This is exactly what is changing in the crypto industry today. In the past, we were more accustomed to discussing how a project was born; next, we may need to get used to discussing how a project dies. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, as regular users, we need to know how to avoid being affected by the aftershocks of a bear market. 1. A new form of “shutdown wave” swept through the Web3 encryption industry. In the last round of expansion, it is actually not difficult for a project to prove that it was “founded.” The completion of financing, the launch of the main network, the issuance/airdrop, and a round of liquidity incentives are enough to attract the first batch of users. TVL, number of addresses, and transaction volume can quickly grow. Even over a long period of time, whether a project actually has revenue is not the most urgent issue. However, when the cycle is reversed, and token prices and liquidity cannot continue to perform financing functions, this model will reveal one of the easiest questions, which is, if no new money comes in, can this project support itself? This round of projects came to an end in 2026, and this is where the real focus is also on. Because many of those that have disappeared are not air projects that had no products at the beginning, but projects that have already been funded, launched, have real users, and even run well technically. For example, on July 23, BitMEX announced that it would officially shut down the trading platform on September 23, 2026. This trading platform, founded in 2014, was once one of the most representative companies in the entire crypto derivatives market. Perpetual contracts, 100x leverage, and a complete set of trading products that were later widely used by the entire industry are closely related to the early development of BitMEX. It even specifically emphasized in its official shutdown announcement that “in more than 11 years of operation, BitMEX has never lost user funds due to hacking,” but this has not made it an infrastructure that can run permanently. A similar story happened on the DeFi and infrastructure circuit. As a Bitcoin L2 project that has been under construction for nearly four years, Botanix has maintained 100% normal operation and zero security incidents since its launch. It has processed about 25 million transactions, 200,000 wallet addresses, and tens of millions of dollars of assets have entered the network, and is connected to infrastructure and DeFi products such as Chainlink and Morpho. Looking only at traditional Crypto KPIs, it's hard to even call it a “no-go” project — the chain has been created, the products can be used, the users have come, and the money has come in. But in the end, Botanix decided to shut down the network, and the review showed that the actual transaction demand was insufficient to generate sufficient fee revenue and could not cover the infrastructure costs required for the long-term operation of an independent network. At the end of the day, Crypto used to be too used to measure an ecosystem with TVL, number of addresses, and number of transactions, but it rarely asked that last question:...

12d agoburnking

Over 100 crypto projects have been shut down in 2026, and the industry is experiencing an internet bubble reshuffle

According to Twitter, more than 100 crypto projects have closed, filed for bankruptcy, or permanently ceased operations since 2026, and the pace of withdrawal is accelerating. In late July alone, BitMEX, BitMart, Movement Labs, and Storj Labs announced closures or submitted related applications. The exit project covered trading platforms, wallets, DeFi lending agreements, the NFT marketplace, and the L1 blockchain; Polka's parallel chain Moonbeam also permanently ceased operation on July 31, and user funds that were not bridged in time were stranded. This round of clean-up has been described as similar to the restructuring of the industry after the bursting of the internet bubble. The number of Ethereum's general-purpose L2 grew rapidly in 2023, but as the threshold for the deployment chain was lowered, the market became congested and projects lacked differentiation. Espresso Systems CEO Ben Fisch said that the current integration phase is a general-purpose L2, not all L2s. Lorenzo Valente, research director at ARK Invest, said that the crypto industry is undergoing the largest consolidation in history, capital is becoming more picky, and teams and trading platforms that lack a fit for the actual product market are being shut down; Hyperliquid and Pump.fun already account for 67% of the total revenue of the application layer. The problem with a large number of projects is that they have usage but no revenue in the traditional sense of the word. Many teams use their own tokens to pay engineers, subsidize liquidity, and cover security audits. Recently, most altcoins in the bear market have fallen by 70% to 90%, making token-denominated capital reserves and operating cycle estimates invalid. DAO governance tool platform Tally, which served more than 500 agreements, processed over $1 billion in payments, and helped protect up to $80 billion in on-chain value, was shut down due to the lack of a sustainable business model for governance tools. The security incident further hastened the exit of the project. Blockaid estimates that on-chain attacks lost $1.1 billion in the first half of 2026, more than the full year of 2025; Kelp DAO and Drift Protocol incidents lost $293 million and $285 million, respectively. TRM Labs estimates that North Korea-related attackers accounted for 66% of total crypto attack losses over the same period. Projects that can continue to grow in a bear market generally rely on dollar revenue rather than their own tokens. Hyperliquid's cumulative processing fees exceeded 1 billion US dollars on June 30, and currently accounts for 70% of the decentralized perpetual contract market; as of July, Aave held more than 12 billion US dollars in deposits, and annual loan fees exceeded 100 million US dollars. What these projects have in common is not the most complex technology, the most financing, or the largest community, but rather the establishment of products that users are willing to pay for. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

13d agoburnking

Nansen CEO: If Robinhood issues coins, it will weaken stock value, L2 strategy focuses on technology

Comparing news, Alex Svanevik, CEO of blockchain data analysis agency Nansen, said in a recent interview that Robinhood is unlikely to launch a token because it may compete with its listed company HOOD stock. Previously, the market speculated that Robinhood might follow some crypto projects to launch ecological tokens, but at present, the company is more likely to use blockchain as an underlying technology tool rather than establish a business system around tokens. Alex Svanevik pointed out that the Layer 2 network currently launched by Robinhood already operates on the Ethereum ecosystem and has gas tokens to pay network fees, so there is no need to issue an additional platform token. The core purpose of Robinhood's blockchain infrastructure is to use blockchain technology to enhance product capabilities, rather than to finance or build a new economic model by issuing tokens. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

13d agoburnking

World Chain will launch the EIP-7928 block access list feature on August 17

Comparatively, World Chain will launch the full block access list on the main network on August 17. This feature will be enabled through a run-time flag without the need to coordinate a hard fork across the network. The network says it will be the first production L2 network to stream EIP-7928 access list data within each flashblock. The feature transmits access list data every 200 ms, enabling validators to verify transactions in parallel during block construction. World Chain said the upgrade aims to achieve a maximum throughput of 1 gigagas per second without increasing validators' hardware requirements. EIP-7928 is an Ethereum upgrade proposal that introduces block-level access lists to record accounts and storage slots touched during block execution. World Chain's internal testing showed that verification delays remained stable as throughput increased to 1 gigagas per second on standard cloud infrastructure.

16d ago