BlockBeats will organize the key industry news content of the week (5.12-5.19) in this article, and recommend in-depth articles to help readers better understand the market and learn about industry trends.

Review of important news this week

US stock trader Keith Gill posted an article after three years, and the return of "GME Stock God" drove Solana Ecosystem Meme Coin GME and AMC to explode

On May 13, Keith Gill, a US stock trader known as Roaring Kitty, posted a tweet, which was his first tweet in three years. Influenced by the tweet of Roaring Kitty's return, GameStop US stocks soared. Prior to this, GME US stocks had experienced a week of gains. With the help of Roaring Kitty, GME's weekly increase was as high as 80%. On the same day, affected by the surge in GameStop US stocks, MEME coins with the same name as GME on multiple blockchains surged. Among them, GME on the Solana chain rose 1518% in 24 hours; GME on the Ethereum chain rose 93,492% in 24 hours; GME on the Base chain rose 322% in 24 hours; KITTY, the meme with the same name as Roaring Kitty on Solana, fell by more than 90% the day after its launch. Related reading: "The "retail investor god" who once defeated Wall Street has returned, and the meme coin of the same name has skyrocketed 100 times in one day"

On May 15, the GME meme coins of Ethereum, Base and other ecosystems all experienced a sharp retracement. Only the "old GME" of the Solana ecosystem remained at a high level in sync with the US stock GME. The Meme token GME on the Solana chain briefly broke through $0.02. In addition to GME, memes surrounding Roaring Kitty herself, from names, personal items to social platforms, have all increased to varying degrees, such as DUMB MONEY, REDDIT, AMC, WSB, HALT, etc. Among them, the AMC concept meme coin on Solana also performed well, setting a new historical high of nearly 3 times the previous high in the past two days. Related reading: "After the return of "GME Stock God", which meme coins are Degen rushing to? "

Two virtual currency underground bank cases were cracked by the police this week, with a total amount of RMB 14.9 billion involved

On May 13, the Panshi City Public Security Bureau of Jilin Province successfully cracked a case of illegal operation of underground banks using virtual currency, involving an amount of about RMB 2.14 billion, and 6 suspects who committed crimes in China and South Korea were arrested. According to the police, the criminal gang in this case used domestic accounts to receive and transfer funds, OTC virtual currency trading, and Korean won settlement to illegally engage in foreign exchange exchange business, helping Korean purchasing agents, cross-border e-commerce, import and export trading companies and other groups to realize the exchange of RMB and Korean won. On May 15, the Chengdu Public Security Bureau recently cracked a large underground bank case involving an amount of up to RMB 13.8 billion. The suspects used USDT Tether as a medium to evade national foreign exchange supervision and illegally provide foreign exchange settlement channels. The case involved 26 provinces (municipalities, autonomous regions) across the country. Now the public security organs have arrested 193 suspects across the country.

Bitcoin price rebounds, breaking through $67,000

On May 13, Bitcoin rebounded to $63,000; on May 15, Bitcoin rose above $64,000; on May 16, Bitcoin broke through $66,000, up more than 7% in 24 hours, reaching a high of $66,250, the biggest increase since March 20. Bitcoin hit its biggest single-day gain in nearly two months on Wednesday.

CME plans to launch Bitcoin spot trading

On May 16, the world's largest futures exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group), plans to launch Bitcoin spot trading, aiming to take advantage of the surge in demand for the cryptocurrency industry from Wall Street fund managers this year. After CME introduced spot Bitcoin trading, the exchange already offers Bitcoin futures trading, which will make it easier for investors to engage in so-called basis trading. Basis trading is a common strategy for professional Bitcoin traders and a major trading method in the U.S. Treasury market. It involves borrowing money to sell futures and buying the underlying asset, and earning profits from the small difference between the two. Most of the U.S. Treasury basis trading occurs on the CME trading venue.

Worldcoin inflation rate may soar to 4% per day in the next 70 days, and insiders try to cash out at high levels

On May 14, DeFi researcher @DefiSquared recently pointed out that Worldcoin has serious inflation problems, and its token WLD has a fully diluted market value of up to $60 billion. In the coming months, the unlocking of WLD will increase significantly, which may lead to a large-scale sell-off. Currently, WLD is diluted by 0.6% every day due to rewards and claims by operators. The Worldcoin Foundation announced that it will sell another $200 million worth of tokens to trading companies, equivalent to 18% of the existing circulating supply, and will be sold at a discount. This part of the funds comes from the part of the WLD token supply called "community", but it is sold to counterparties to benefit the foundation. More importantly, after 70 days, when VC and team tokens begin to unlock, the supply of WLD will increase by 4% per day. At a fully diluted market cap of $60 billion, this equates to nearly $50 million per day of sustained selling pressure.

According to analysis, Worldcoin's token economic model was designed to be predatory from the beginning to benefit the team and early investors. In December last year, the foundation even deliberately terminated the market maker contract, allowing prices to be squeezed up with low circulation. This manipulative design of low circulation and high valuation directly benefits insiders because they can hedge the high-valuation locked shares through contracts and over-the-counter transactions before unlocking. Most retail investors may not even know that Sam Altman is no longer actively involved in Worldcoin and the project has no relationship with OpenAI. Related reading: "WLD may trigger a months-long sell-off after unlocking a huge amount of tokens in July"

During the US election, Trump made positive remarks on the crypto industry, driving the meme token TRUMP to continue to rise

This week, during the 2024 US presidential primary election, compared with the current US President Biden's opposition to the crypto industry, former US President Trump supported the crypto industry. In his speech, Trump talked about "If you support cryptocurrency, you'd better vote for Trump." Trump's pro-crypto move gave the community enough "emotional value". In recent days, Trump's eponymous meme coin TRUMP, which has been sideways for two months, has risen sharply, with the highest increase of 140%. Related reading: "It's better to buy $TRUMP directly than to vote for Trump", "Trump's "Crypto Dinner": Blasting Biden; Shaping a "Pro-Crypto" Personality". On May 16, Arkham data showed that the value of crypto assets held by former US President Donald Trump increased significantly, currently about US$8.97 million, including: 579,290 TRUMP, worth US$5.79 million; 431,018 ETH, worth US$1.3 million; 374,724 WETH, worth US$1.13 million.

The U.S. Senate voted to overturn the SEC's controversial crypto-asset accounting regulations

On May 17, the U.S. Senate voted 60 to 38 to overturn the SEC's controversial crypto-asset accounting regulations. The SEC's previously issued Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB 121) requires companies to record their crypto assets on their balance sheets, but critics believe that this regulation is too strict and actually prevents major custodians and companies from holding crypto assets for their clients.

The US CPI fell as expected in April, and the swap market expects the Fed to accelerate the pace of interest rate cuts in 2024

On May 15, the US April unadjusted CPI annual rate was 3.4%, lower than 3.5% in the previous month, in line with market expectations. The core CPI monthly rate in April fell to 0.3% as expected, the lowest since December last year. On May 15, after the release of CPI data, the swap market expected the Fed to accelerate the pace of interest rate cuts in 2024.

Powell believes that the April PPI exceeded expectations and is less confident about the decline in inflation than before

On May 14, Fed Chairman Powell said in a speech that the US economy is performing very well and has a very strong labor market. There was no further progress in US inflation in the first quarter, but there is no expectation that the inflation path will be smooth, and we must wait patiently for policies to work. The Fed expects GDP to continue to grow at 2% or higher, and is less confident than before that inflation will fall back. On May 14, Powell said of the Producer Price Index (PPI) in April: "I wouldn't call it overheated. I would call it mixed." (PPI's main interpretation of PCE may be offset by lower airfares and health care costs, which may offset the hotter financial services sub-items.)

Eigenpie: 1% of the total EGP tokens will be airdropped to eligible users of Binance and OKX's Web3 wallets

On May 13, Eigenpi, a SubDAO organization under the multi-chain yield protocol Magpie that provides liquidity re-staking services, announced that 1% of the total EGP tokens will be distributed as airdrops to the first 60,000 Web3 wallet users on Binance who participated in the BounceBit Binance Megadrop Web3 Quest. The allocation represents 0.60% of the total EGP token supply, which is equivalent to 60% of the 1% airdrop allocated by the program. 40% of the 1% airdrop has been designated to 40,000 OKX Web3 wallet users. The airdrop will be claimed after the EGP token TGE is completed.

Blast announced that the airdrop will start on June 26

On May 16, Ethereum Layer 2 network Blast announced that the airdrop will start on June 26, and due to a slight delay from the initial estimate in May, the airdrop allocation will increase. Before the airdrop, Blast will have two final Gold Distribution events to distribute gold points to DApps.

Bloomberg Analyst: Ethereum Spot ETF is Not Expected to Be Approved by the US SEC Before the End of 2025

On May 14, there were only nine days left for the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to approve or reject the Ethereum spot ETF. Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg, said he did not expect the ETF to be approved before the end of 2025. Meanwhile, bettors on the on-chain prediction market Polymarket believe that there is a 14% chance that the US SEC will approve the ETF before May 31. On May 14, Scott Johnsson, a well-known financial lawyer, wrote that the SEC is considering the security of ETH in the ETH spot ETF order. Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart commented that it seems that the possibility of the SEC rejecting the Ethereum spot ETF with "Ethereum is a security" has risen.

OpenAI launches new flagship AI model GPT-4o, Google releases new AI model Project Astra, benchmarking GPT4o

On May 14, OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said that it would launch a desktop version of ChatGPT and launch a new flagship artificial intelligence model called GPT-4o. In terms of API usage, GPT-4o is half the price of GPT-4-turbo and twice as fast as GPT-4-turbo. On May 15, Google held the "I/O 2024" annual developer conference and released a new AI agent product Project Astra, which can achieve multi-modal real-time reasoning across text, audio, and video, just like GPT4o released by OpenAI. An update to Gemini 1.5 Pro was also launched, and its artificial intelligence model will soon be able to process more data, as well as a new, smaller Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model.

Tether and Ripple broke out a "war of words", and Tether significantly increased its compliance lobbying expenses

On May 13, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in an interview that the next target of the US government is the USDT issuer, the stablecoin company Tether. Some experts believe that the statement of the Ripple CEO is a very big insider report. If it really happens, there will be a very large selling pressure in the USDT stablecoin market. In this case, the value of USDT will fall sharply. Then Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino allegedly responded to this matter: A Tether competitor company that is under investigation by the SEC is currently spreading FUD related to Tether and USDT. Ardoino reiterated the security of the Tether ecosystem and listed examples of the current noteworthy situations in the ecosystem.

LayerZero airdrop activity enters bounty hunting phase, 2312 witch reports collected

On May 18, LayerZero officials said that the witch "surrender" phase is now over. Each surrendered address will receive 15% of its expected token allocation, and the remaining 85% will be returned to qualified users. After witch surrenders and analysis by LayerZero, Chaos Labs, and Nansen, 803,093 addresses were identified as potential witches. This number initially exceeded 2 million, but the authorities adopted stricter standards to minimize "accidental killings". After the surrender period ends, the bounty hunting period will immediately begin. The "reporter" needs to provide at least 20 addresses with witch operations written down, and can get 10% of the expected token allocation of the witch address. In the case of multiple people reporting the same address, the bounty will be issued to the first reporter.

The full list of witch addresses identified in the preliminary analysis has been published, and the list should not be considered final until the final report is released. The final list of witches will be announced after the bounty hunt ends on May 31. Layerzero Lianchuang said that addresses that were mistakenly reported as witches can appeal by filling out a form. 2,312 reports have been collected for witch reporting, of which 608 have been reviewed and 1,704 are still under review.

zkLink will implement airdrop witch detection, and "surrender" can receive 25% of the expected reward

On May 16, zkLink, a multi-chain transaction infrastructure based on zero-knowledge proof, announced that it will implement strict witch detection for all Lynks NFT holders, which means that holders need to pass anti-witch testing and KYC verification when receiving ZKL rewards. All Lynks NFT Sybil users are given the opportunity to self-report within the next 10 days, in return they will receive 25% of the expected rewards, no accountability, Sybil data will be kept confidential. Sybils discovered by the zkLink Core DAO will receive 0 rewards. Real users who are falsely detected as Sybils will have the opportunity to appeal. All eligible Lynks NFT holders will be rewarded $ZKL. In order to fulfill the promise of the previous community vote, each Lynks NFT minted in Phase 1 of Season 1 (i.e. before 10:00 UTC on April 14), i.e. NFT numbers 0-1576, will receive 1480 ZKL. And each eligible Lynks NFT numbered 1577-3999 will receive 1100 ZKL.

Pump.fun was attacked, and a former employee used company privileges to embezzle about 12,300 SOL (about 1.9 million US dollars)

On May 17, pump.fun was suspected of being attacked, and the attacker could participate in the meme coins released by the platform indefinitely through a vulnerability. Phantom wallet temporarily blocked the official website of the pump.fun project. Subsequently, Pump.fun stated in a post by X that the team was aware that the contract had been leaked and was investigating. Pump.fun then stated that its contract was safe and that the attack was caused by a former employee who used his privileged position in the company to embezzle about 12,300 SOL (about 1.9 million US dollars). To compensate users, the pump.fun team injected SOL liquidity greater than or equal to that token for each affected token within 24 hours. Related reading: "Pump.fun was stolen $1.9 million, a quick look at the incident"

Vitalik: The properties that make Ethereum unique should be respected, and efforts should continue to be made to maintain and improve them

On May 17, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said, "I think the Ethereum ideology in 2021 has indeed become too comfortable, shifting the responsibility to a few large participants, as long as there is some kind of market mechanism or zero-knowledge proof system to force centralized participants to act honestly. Such a system usually works well in general, but can cause catastrophic failures in the worst case. The current Ethereum protocol proposal has clearly deviated from that model and takes the need for a truly decentralized network more seriously. Ideas about stateless nodes, MEV relief, single-slot finality, and similar concepts have taken greater steps in this direction. A year ago, the idea of sampling data availability on centralized relay nodes was seriously considered. This year has gotten rid of this need, and the progress of PeerDAS has been unexpectedly strong.

Coinbase Report: Ethereum may see an unexpected rise in the coming months

On May 17, Coinbase Ethereum (ETH) has lagged behind the cryptocurrency market this year, but its long-term positioning remains strong and has the potential to deliver unexpected gains, according to a research report released on Wednesday. Ethereum does not have an oversupply problem, and its position as a decentralized finance (DeFi) center is unlikely to be replaced. The market may have underestimated the timing and possibility of approval of a U.S. spot Ethereum ETF.

zkSync announced that it will release the last v24 version of the protocol upgrade before handing over network governance to the community

On May 18, zkSync officials said that this has been the only focus since supporting EIP4844 in March. The upcoming v24 version is the last planned protocol upgrade that needs to be carried out before handing over network governance to the community. The remaining missing parts are expected to be completed by the end of June.

Hot articles this week

The "retail stock god" who once defeated Wall Street has returned, and the meme coin of the same name has skyrocketed 100 times in one day

On May 13, a tweet went viral in the U.S. stock trading and crypto communities, with over 6 million views in five hours. The tweet came from Roaring Kitty, a former U.S. stock trader. This was his first tweet in three years. Although no one can tell what the content of the tweet represents, it does not prevent the entire trading community from being excited about the name Roaring Kitty. Who is Roaring Kitty? Why is she so influential? Why did GME come back to life under her leadership?

How did a retail KOL beat Wall Street shorts and make $40 million?

Roaring Kitty, one of the best retail traders ever, turned $53,000 into more than $46 million on $GME. After three years of seclusion, he is back and has led a new round of MEME craze. Whether it is US stocks or cryptocurrencies, $GME has re-started the moon landing mode. This is his story and inspiration.

After the return of "GME Stock God", which meme coins are the degens rushing for?

After the return of Roaring Kitty, the "retail stock god" behind the GME short squeeze, after three years, a crazy meme craze has been set off in both the US stock market and the crypto market. At present, the popularity of GME is still continuing, and the related memes in the crypto market are also showing a flourishing situation. In the face of overwhelming traffic, which meme coins are the crypto degens rushing for?

Uncovering the largest conference in the history of the Bitcoin community, what was discussed in Hong Kong?

Last April, also in Hong Kong, the Bitcoin Ordinals community held its first gathering, and only a few attendees were familiar with the Ordinals protocol or Bitcoin NFT. Things are different now. Compared with last year, this year's Bitcoin ecosystem gathering is obviously more lively. Too many important things have happened to Bitcoin, including the rise of the Ordinals protocol, the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF, the warming Bitcoin ecosystem, and the fourth halving of Bitcoin... Last week, the largest Bitcoin conference held in Hong Kong just ended. What did everyone talk about at the meeting?

How to seize the best opportunity to speculate on the US election Meme coin? A full analysis of key time points and concept coins

On May 13, Trump invited some of his NFT holders to a dinner. The video of the dinner went viral in the crypto community. In the video, Trump said that he accepted the development of cryptocurrencies and said that Biden and the Democratic Party had always been against cryptocurrencies. This also brought about the resurgence of Trump's Crypto Meme track. In recent days, Trump's eponymous Meme coin TRUMP, which has been sideways for two months, has risen sharply, with the highest increase of 140%. As people in the currency circle continue to pay attention to and hype the concept of the US election, they may continue to have more opportunities to make money.

Ethereum's native protocol, fleeing to Solana

Solana has consolidated its position as a top blockchain after its rebirth from the ashes of the FTX/Alameda collapse. In the ensuing community-led resurgence, the sweat of the Solana native team drove the wheels of progress, but with the steady growth of SOL prices and DeFi indicators within its ecosystem, non-Solana native protocols are also ready to seize this opportunity to take off.

Solana Meme "Surge": Most Retracements Exceed 70%, Liquidity Bottlenecks Have Become the Norm

A few days ago, @cryptowhail asked me an existential question at five in the morning: "Are we now in an active period in the SOL market?" This question got me thinking about how the memes on the SOL chain have performed since the fourth quarter of last year. We looked at the data. This data comes from the SOL memes published by @CryptoKoryo through the Dune Dashboard in the past few months. This is a process of manually selecting memes and finding data, but I think we did a pretty good job.

Why do VCs raise project FDV? Investment from a meme perspective

The author of this article puts forward a view that governance tokens are essentially meme coins. Starting from the project agreement, he analyzed and compared the similarities between governance tokens and meme coins to explain why VCs need to raise FDV. In addition, he also expressed his insights on project financing, community building and fair launch, and proposed a more fair launch direction for cryptocurrency projects.

Data analysis, can you make money by following KOLs to trade in cryptocurrencies?

From the perspective of the entire industry, what is the final performance of KOLs in leading orders? Several researchers from Harvard Business School, Indiana University Business School and Texas A&M University jointly published a paper titled "Crypto Influencers". The article studies the performance of crypto-related returns mentioned in approximately 36,000 tweets posted by 180 of the most famous cryptocurrency social media influencers (KOLs) over a two-year period ending in December 2022, covering more than 1,600 tokens.

Is Starknet's airdrop successful?

Crypto researcher KERMAN KOHLI analyzes whether Starknet's airdrop was successful in terms of claiming and issuing Starknet airdrop tokens, data, and time. The author hopes to explore the main differences in the token claiming mechanism by studying the two token airdrops of Starknet and Optimism. The data is now about a month out of date, but considering that the airdrop was completed a few months ago, it is not far from the actual number.

Found guilty! What does the Tornado Cash case ruling mean for DeFi regulation?

On May 14, a Dutch judge ruled at the Court of 's-Hertogenbosch that Alexey Pertsev, one of the founders and core developer of Tornado Cash, was guilty of money laundering. The court sentenced Pertsev to 64 months in prison. Over the past year, the DeFi regulatory issues raised by Tornado Cash have been of great concern to the industry. This year, despite the team's repeated emphasis on its compliance tendencies, Uniswap, the "big brother" in the DeFi field, was sued by the SEC. Today, what impact will the guilty verdict of Tornado Cash's co-founder have on future DeFi startup teams? How will DeFi coexist with regulation in the future?

Notcoin is about to open, what is the valuation range?

Since its launch on January 1, 2024, Notcoin has become one of the most popular and user-friendly channels on Telegram. The community is very popular, with more than 30 million participants and an average daily active peak of more than 5 million, backed by Telegram, which has more than 1.3 billion users. Notcoin has recently evolved from a Telegram game with simple and straightforward gameplay logic to gaining the favor of mainstream crypto exchanges and funds. It will be listed on 18 exchanges on May 16, including Binance, Okx, Bybit, Kucoin, etc.

Pump.fun was stolen $1.9 million, a quick look at the incident

On May 17, according to community feedback, pump.fun was suspected of being attacked, and the attacker was able to participate in the meme coins released by the platform indefinitely through a vulnerability. On May 17, pump.fun released the latest progress of the incident. The attack was caused by a former employee who used his privileged position in the company to embezzle about 12,300 SOL (about $1.9 million). To compensate users, the pump.fun team will inject SOL liquidity greater than or equal to the token for each affected token after 15:21 UTC time within the next 24 hours.

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