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Regulatory/Macro

DefiTuna reveals M3M3 platform’s $200 million market manipulation plan involving multiple projects including LIBRA and MELANIA

According to SolanaFloor, on February 17, 2025, Moty, the founder of DefiTuna, publicly announced through the X platform that DefiTuna had refunded Kelsier, an investor who invested $30,000 in the project on January 16, 2025, and severed all ties with him. This decision was made after Kelsier was suspected of being involved in market manipulation, especially his association with LIBRA, MELANIA and the meme coin launchpad platform M3M3. Moty disclosed a series of suspected well-planned token manipulation behaviors that caused community members to suffer large-scale fund withdrawals. "After discovering Kelsier's activities, we have refunded Kelsier and cut off all ties," Moty wrote. After announcing the decision, Moty elaborated on his concerns in a series of posts, claiming that Kelsier was involved in an elaborate plan to extract a large amount of funds from the meme coin launchpad platform M3M3. Meteora's leadership, including Ben, facilitated a large number of influencers who benefited greatly at the expense of the community. Despite being contacted directly, Meteora’s core contributors have shown little accountability. Ben, a co-founder of Meteora, said he would resign after being questioned, but has only issued vague public responses. “I have personally done everything I can, risking myself and everything we have built at DefiTuna, to try to get key people to speak up and start identifying these bad actors and weeding them out,” said Moty. SolanaFloor contacted Moty to learn more about DefiTuna’s interactions with Kelsier and gain insight into how the Meteora-powered M3M3 platform operates. Moty detailed DefiTuna’s interactions with Kelsier, revealing that Kelsier approached them through Lebanese employee Thomas to request assistance in providing liquidity for M3M3. Initially, M3M3 was advertised as an independent platform, but it was later revealed that Ben had become its owner. Kelsier’s involvement requires projects launched on M3M3 to allocate a percentage of the token supply to them. Vlad, a co-founder of DefiTuna, passively participated in the belief that the collaboration was legal. Moty revealed that Kelsier personally asked them to provide liquidity for M3M3, and Meteora co-founder Ben banned any trading outside of Meteora. When DefiTuna proposed a neutral liquidity allocation strategy, they were ignored. Moty said that more than $200 million was stolen from multiple projects including AIAI, MATES, ENRON, Melania, and Libra. Screenshots show that Hayden shared the minting addresses of these tokens with a group of influencers in front of the official launchpad, enabling them to buy in advance and make a huge profit. When asked about Kelsier's total profit from M3M3, Moty replied: "If you count AIAI, MATES, ENRON, a bunch of other projects... Melania and LIBRA... it's over $200 million. There are a lot of other projects."

ESMA launches public consultation on developing crypto-asset advisory standards

According to Cryptoslate, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has launched a public consultation on guidelines for assessing the knowledge and capabilities of professionals providing crypto-asset services under the Crypto-Asset Market Regulation (MiCA). The consultation, published on February 17, aims to standardize the qualifications and experience required for individuals to provide advice or information to clients on digital assets. The draft guidelines set clear professional qualifications, work experience and continuing education standards for employees employed by crypto-asset service providers (CASPs). According to the proposal, individuals who provide crypto-asset investment advice must meet stricter competency requirements than those who provide basic information services. ESMA outlines that advisors must have a higher education degree or equivalent, receive at least 160 hours of professional training, and have at least one year of relevant experience. Those who provide general information on crypto-assets require at least 80 hours of professional qualification training and six months of supervised experience. All professionals must pass an assessment exam and complete ongoing training - at least 10 hours per year for information providers and at least 20 hours per year for advisors - to ensure that their knowledge remains up to date. The guidelines also emphasize the importance of understanding the risks unique to crypto-assets, including market volatility, cybersecurity threats, blockchain governance, and liquidity risks associated with major asset holders. In addition, ESMA proposes that companies should conduct annual internal reviews to assess whether employees comply with these standards. Market participants, including CASP, investors, financial institutions and industry associations, are invited to provide feedback on the proposed standards. ESMA will accept comments until April 22, 2025 and expects to publish final guidelines in the third quarter of that year.

Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission: Virtual asset development roadmap will be announced this month

According to the Hong Kong Radio website, Ye Zhiheng, executive director of the intermediary department of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, is expected to announce a virtual asset development roadmap this month. In addition to explaining the development principles, the roadmap will also mention the scope of the SFC's expectations and market research in the short term, as well as the areas that platform participants hope to optimize. In addition, the focus of the virtual asset roadmap is not on the content itself, but on the SFC's courage to show the principles to the market and its attitude for the market to consider.

Market News: LIBRA team is negotiating with the Nigerian government to launch Meme coin

According to unconfirmed reports cited by Beincrypto, the LIBRA team has also been in talks with Nigerian officials about issuing another unstable meme coin. As of now, there is no evidence that Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has a direct connection with LIBRA, but his team is reportedly in close talks. Hayden Davis, CEO of LIBRA Market Maker, claims that he has received a large number of invitations to assist in more "rug pull" scams. The controversial meme coin LIBRA, endorsed by Argentine President Javier Milei, has become the center of allegations of massive fraud. After the market value plummeted, President Milei denied any connection with LIBRA and faced investigation and impeachment threats. Even more shocking is that the LIBRA team plans to join forces with the Nigerian government to launch a new meme coin. The key figure connecting LIBRA and Nigerian officials is Hayden Davis, CEO of Kelsier Ventures. He is a US citizen, which may give the FBI and the Department of Justice jurisdiction to investigate the LIBRA incident. Previously, Davis casually admitted to multiple major financial crimes in a long interview. He said that these crimes brought him new opportunities. Community sleuths speculate that Davis was behind the meme coin MELANIA and related scams, and he confirmed these allegations in the interview. In other words, MELANIA may have given Davis influence over Nigerian officials before LIBRA. The report was unable to confirm whether the Nigerian president was involved in the plan. However, Davis said that "the project is already going well" and that several members of his team are actively involved. Nigeria's recent enthusiasm for the cryptocurrency space adds credibility to these claims.

Institutional investors hold 25.4% of the assets under management of spot Bitcoin ETFs, totaling $26.8 billion

According to Cryptoslate, as of December 31, 2024, institutional investors held 25.4% of the assets under management (AUM) of spot Bitcoin ETFs, totaling $26.8 billion. Vetle Lunde, head of research at K33 Research, said that the proportion of Bitcoin ETF AUM held by institutional investors increased by 113% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2024. In addition, the proportion of assets under management held by institutional investors also increased by 4.1% quarterly, as the total assets under management jumped 69% to $78.8 billion at the end of the fourth quarter. According to Lunde, the number of investors exposed to Bitcoin through ETFs reached 1,576 last quarter, a quarterly increase of 37.4% and an annual increase of 68.2%. Lunde's data also showed that institutional interest in BlackRock's IBIT increased more than fourfold in 2024. At the end of the fourth quarter of last year, institutional holdings of IBIT shares were reported at $16 billion, while the amount held through shares at the end of the first quarter was less than $4 billion, with most of the growth occurring between the third and fourth quarters. According to Bold Report, BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF has $56.4 billion in assets under management, while all other U.S.-traded spot Bitcoin ETFs have a combined total of $56.9 billion in assets under management.

US stock exchange MEMX applies to SEC for approval to list 21Shares XRP ETF

According to Cointelegraph, the US stock exchange MEMX has applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for approval to list the 21Shares XRP ETF as a "commodity trust", and the relevant documents have been submitted to the regulator. This move marks another effort by US exchanges to list ETFs containing spot XRP. This application also highlights the SEC's shift in its stance on cryptocurrencies.

AI

xAI launches Grok-3 intelligent search engine named Deepsearch

According to Jinshi.com, xAI launched the Grok-3 intelligent search engine called Deepsearch.

Musk's xAI releases Grok 3 chatbot, with mathematical reasoning performance exceeding GPT4o

According to Cailianshe, Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI released the Grok 3 chatbot. According to xAI engineers, the training involved in Grok 3 is 10 times that of Grok 2. Musk said that in terms of mathematical reasoning, scientific logical reasoning, and code writing, Grok-3 has achieved better results than DeepSeek-v3, GPT-4o, and Gemini-2 pro in multiple benchmark tests.

Musk confirms xAI is about to open an AI gaming studio

According to Jinshi.com, on February 17, overseas blogger Dima Zeniuk posted a photo of Elon Musk and several people on the X platform, with the caption saying that xAI is about to open an AI game studio. Later, Musk himself confirmed the news, emphasizing that "this thing must be done well" and reiterated "Make games great again!".

Safe Superintelligence, an AI company co-founded by OpenAI, is raising $1 billion at a valuation of over $30 billion

According to Zhitong Finance, people familiar with the matter revealed that OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever is raising more than $1 billion for his AI startup Safe Superintelligence, bringing its valuation to more than $30 billion, thus leaping into the ranks of the world's most valuable private technology companies. People familiar with the matter said that Greenoaks Capital Partners, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, is leading this round of financing and plans to invest $500 million. Greenoaks has also previously invested in AI companies ScaleAI and Databricks. The above-mentioned people familiar with the matter pointed out that Greenoaks Capital Partners, a well-known venture capital firm based in San Francisco, is leading the investment in Safe Superintelligence with a planned investment of up to $500 million. It is worth noting that Greenoaks is also an important investor in Scale AI and Databricks Inc., outstanding companies in the field of artificial intelligence. This background undoubtedly adds more expectations for the future development of Safe Superintelligence. It is reported that this financing will significantly increase Sutskever's valuation, which is a significant increase compared to the previous $5 billion. However, it is worth noting that financing negotiations are still in full swing and the relevant details are still subject to change.

Project News

Ethereum Beam Chain Update: 8 new teams join, plans to change name due to trademark issues involving "Beam"

Justin.eth Drake, a core developer of Ethereum, shared the progress of the first community conference call of Beam Chain on Twitter, and announced that February 28th will be the time for the second conference call, which will focus on technical progress. Due to trademark issues involving the name "Beam", the project will be renamed. The meeting summarized the joining of 8 new teams, the support of 6 mainnet consensus layer teams, and the introduction of 2 new coordinators who joined the Ethereum Foundation. At present, Beam Chain has a total of 14 consensus layer teams, covering all continents except Antarctica, using a variety of programming languages including Zig, C, C++, C#, and many self-funded teams have emerged. Justin believes that Beam Chain provides an excellent entry point for developers to deeply understand the underlying technology of Ethereum L1. In addition, the meeting also discussed the key role of ZKVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) technology in Beam Chain, and announced a series of research and development plans, including ZK acceleration and multi-language support. Earlier news, a researcher from the Ethereum Foundation proposed a consensus layer upgrade proposal "Beam Chain", which was called "Ethereum 3.0" by the community.

KernelDAO to conduct $KERNEL token TGE in February

The re-staking platform KernelDAO officially announced that the $KERNEL Token Generation Event (TGE) is scheduled to be held in February 2025, and the specific date has not yet been announced. It is reported that 55% will be allocated to community rewards and airdrops (20% for airdrops and 35% for future community rewards), 5% to the ecosystem and partners, 20% for private sales, and 20% to the team and consultants (the team and private sales tokens have a 6-month lock-up period and will be unlocked within 24 months). In addition, 20% of KERNEL tokens will be distributed through three rounds of airdrops. According to previous news, BNB Chain ecological re-staking infrastructure Kernel has completed a total of US$10 million in financing, and investors include Binance Labs.

Hyper Foundation: HyperEVM Mainnet is now officially launched

The Hyper Foundation stated on the X platform that HyperEVM has officially launched. This is an important step towards achieving universal programmability in Hyperliquid's high-performance financial system to accommodate all financial visions. The initial mainnet release of HyperEVM includes: 1. HyperEVM blocks built as part of L1 execution, inheriting all security from HyperBFT consensus; 2. Instant transfers between native spot HYPE and HyperEVM HYPE; As a reminder, HYPE is the native gas token on HyperEVM; 3. The canonical WHYPE system contract deployed at 0x555...5 for DeFi applications. In future network upgrades, universal ERC20 native transfers and precompilations will be enabled. Although these features have been implemented on the testnet, the mainnet release is being carried out in stages to minimize the impact on existing users on L1. HyperEVM can be combined with L1 states without affecting the low-latency trading experience of existing users.

Jupiter Co-founder: Meteora Co-founder Ben resigned and has hired a law firm to issue a LIBRA investigation report

Jupiter co-founder meow said on the X platform: "As a co-founder of Meteora, I want to reiterate my confidence that Jupiter or anyone at Meteora will not engage in any insider trading or financial malfeasance, nor will any tokens be obtained in an improper manner. Secondly, we are hiring an independent third party (law firm Fenwick & West) to investigate and publish a report, and they will publish the report independently. Third, I stand by Ben and his statement. He said there was no financial impropriety in dealing with partners, and I believe him. For more than a year, Meteora has been operating as an independent entity from Jupiter, and Ben has been running it without my significant involvement. Although I have full confidence in Ben's character, as the project leader, Ben's lack of judgment and attention to the core aspects of the project in the past few months is unacceptable. Therefore, Ben has chosen to resign and will look for new leadership for Meteora. Ben has always been helpful in the ecosystem, and I hope everyone will remain friendly during his clarification."

Emergency Ethereum Geth patch fixes Merge oversight and prevents validators from suffering financial losses

According to Cryptoslate, the 1.15.2 version of Geth, a key client of the Ethereum protocol, has been released to fix a bug that affected the creation of mainnet blocks in the previous version. According to Go Ethereum, this emergency update solves a regression problem in the beacon consensus engine that caused validators to miss block opportunities and could cause economic losses. A regression problem in earlier versions affected the consensus engine's handling of mainnet block construction because it did not take into account the situation where MergeNetsplitBlock was not defined in the chain configuration. This change was introduced in a recent update to the beacon consensus engine, causing the mainnet to not be recognized as running under the PoS mechanism, thereby undermining block creation and network expected performance. The developer detailed that the regression problem originated from the removal of a test method called TestingTTDBlock. The method was originally added during internal testing to simulate Merge blocks. After removing this method, the system no longer bypasses the reliance on total difficulty, which previously allowed the engine to ignore the normal fork order and inadvertently enable Merge before the London fork. Users running version 1.15.1 are advised to upgrade to version 1.15.2 immediately to avoid missing block creation opportunities and incurring financial penalties. Geth v1.15.2 now provides a configuration that correctly recognizes the mainnet as a merged state and restores the necessary network discovery protocol, thereby restoring expected operating parameters.

GetTrumpMemes will airdrop TRUMP tokens to users who purchase Trump products before February 15

According to Cointelegraph, GetTrumpMemes announced that it will airdrop TRUMP tokens to users who purchase Trump-related peripheral products before February 15.

Viewpoint

Matrixport: XRP rebound signals appear, but SEC regulatory uncertainty remains

Matrixport analysis points out that the recent trend of XRP against USDT has changed from long-term sideways to rapid growth, and the complexity of market chart analysis has increased. In trading strategies, the relative strength index (RSI) is a commonly used indicator. Historical data shows that when the RSI is close to 40%, the probability of XRP rebounding is higher, and when the RSI is close to 70%, it may enter an overbought state. At present, the RSI of XRP is about 40%, and the technical side shows that it still has the potential to rise. Especially after the new US government takes office, the SEC may review the lawsuit against Ripple Labs, which brings certain uncertainties to the market. Analysts believe that the recent rebound of XRP may have further room for upward movement.

SlowMist Cosine responded to Jupiter's collection of evidence of illegal behavior by employees: The owner of a certain address suspected to know what happened

SlowMist founder Cos posted on the X platform that the address doodo...kqg7 "tested" the following three CAs one after another immediately after Argentine President Milley tweeted. Ordinary people may think that there is nothing to question, but what is interesting is that these three CAs are actually from the same person (the relationship cannot be directly seen on the chain, and we have various data cross-references). So I said that the owner of this address should know what happened, maybe he was just performing his routine tests in Jupiter. ARG CA: ZRfYvM1aNWyqAbhaN1jGmgwBgbed6ah6Xo2qFZNGaPQLIBRA CA:ApxSjBnuVF18mrWFm3PveMZseCJoLETmVN8wvfU9hTwb (yes, it is not the real $LIBRA)SPL Token CA: Bo9jh3wsmcC2AjakLWzNmKJ3SgtZmXEcSaW7L2FAvUsU (yes, it is the real $LIBRA) Yu Xian said that he posted the above post because Jupiter’s tweet mentioned: “If there is evidence that Jupiter employees have leaked information or engaged in other sniping behavior, please contact us directly. If we find that a team member is operating with non-public information, we will take quick and decisive action.”

Argentine President: I did not promote LIBRA, I just shared LIBRA information

Argentine President Milley said on a TV show, "I acted in good faith and got hit. The country did not lose money, Argentines lost at most four or five. The vast majority of investors are Chinese and Americans. I share this information, just like hundreds of things I have shared. My tweet was sent three minutes after the coin was created because I am passionate about these things and understand it. These people are volatility traders and know what they are doing. It is false to say that 44,000 people were affected, at most 5,000 people. The possibility of involving Argentines is very small. These are people who are very professional in this financial instrument. Those who participated were very aware of the risks they took - they are volatility traders. This is a private matter between individuals and they participated voluntarily. I did not promote LIBRA, I just shared the LIBRA message. I did it because I am a committed tech optimist. Any initiative that improves access to funding for tech entrepreneurs is appealing to me. I made no mistakes because I acted with good intentions. But when I saw the consequences, I realized I had a lot to learn. I needed to understand that after becoming president, I continued to act the same way. Unfortunately, this situation made me realize that I needed to raise my standards and stop being so accessible.”

Important data

Suspected Galaxy Digital address lost $8.493 million on PNUT, ai16z and arc

According to @ai_9684xtpa, an address suspected to belong to Galaxy Digital spent $16.41 million to build positions in three Memecoins: $PNUT, $ai16z, and $arc in the past three months. However, the cumulative floating loss of this address on these three tokens has reached $8.493 million, and it is not yet clear whether it has participated in market making activities. $PNUT: 21.46 million pieces, the cost of opening a position is $0.3743, and the current floating loss is $4.935 million. $ai16z: 7.53 million pieces, the cost of opening a position is $0.7446, and the current floating loss is $3.133 million.

Lawyer: Nearly 75,000 users suffered losses in LIBRA token transactions, with a total loss of approximately US$286 million

According to data disclosed by crypto lawyer wassielawyer, a total of 74,698 traders suffered losses in LIBRA token transactions, with a total loss of approximately $286 million. Specific data shows that there are 25 traders who lost more than $1 million; 2,409 users whose losses ranged from $10,000 to $50,000; and 71,369 users whose losses ranged from $0 to $10,000. In addition, the average loss per trader was approximately $3,833.

In 2018, the ETH OG whale deposited 5,000 ETH on Binance, worth $13.65 million

According to on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa, the ETH OG whale in 2018 recharged 5,000 ETH worth $13.65 million to Binance 20 minutes ago. This part of ETH may be traced back to 2018: This address continued to hoard ether during the 2018-2020 bear market, and its average cost was as low as $194. If it is sold, the return rate will exceed 1,300%.

Trump family crypto project WLFI withdraws 10 million USDC from Binance and purchases 200 million WLFI

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, 6 hours ago, the newly created multi-signature wallet of the Trump family's crypto project World Liberty Finance (WLFI) withdrew 10 million USDC from Binance and purchased 200 million WLFI.

Barstool founder converts $5 million in compensation from LIBRA team into SOL and deposits it into Kraken

According to Lookonchain monitoring, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy exchanged 5 million USDC compensation from the LIBRA team into 27,688 SOL and deposited 29,657 SOL (about US$5.29 million) to Kraken.

Binance will support Moonbeam (GLMR) network upgrades.

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