BitGo: Crypto Water Cooler — Mar 13

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GM. It’s Wednesday, March 13.

Newsmakers

Crypto PACs Make Waves in Key Super Tuesday Races

Super Tuesday is a red-letter day in U.S. elections. This year, it was also a test of the crypto industry’s ability to sway election results. Crypto super PACs Fairshake, Protect Progress, and Defend American Jobs spent $13MM of their $80MM+ on races in California, Alabama, Texas, and North Carolina. Three crypto-friendly Democrats and one pro-crypto Republican won their races.

Fairshake spent more than $10MM to fight Rep. Katie Porter’s (D-CA, 47th District) bid for the Senate, fearing she would be a digital asset antagonist. She lost to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA, 30th District) whose agenda included a call for regulation to keep crypto firms in the U.S.

Protect Progress spent $1.7MM supporting Shomari Figures in Alabama’s House race. Figures, a former Justice Department official who is calling for policies that embrace digital assets, qualified for a run-off election. Protect Progress also spent nearly $1MM supporting Julie Johnson (D-TX, District 115) against a raft of challengers for her House seat. Johnson, who included pro-crypto language on her website, won just over half the votes, narrowly avoiding a run-off.

Tim Moore got more than $500,000 in crypto PAC support for his North Carolina Congressional race, winning the primary for a seat Republicans think they can flip come November.

Crypto PACs intend to “spend heavily” in the March 19th Ohio Republican primary, where three candidates, including pro-crypto Bernie Moreno, are vying to run against incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in November. Brown, a noted crypto skeptic, currently chairs the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. Meanwhile, Donald Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — is “coming around” to Bitcoin; three years ago he called it a scam.

Read more →New York Times ($)

AI Crypto Tokens Are Buzzy. Here’s How They Could Deliver Value

AI crypto tokens got plenty of buzz last year, ending the year as the third best performing category in Q4 2023. But, when AI chip making giant Nvidia reported in February that they had exceeded their Q4 2023 earning goals, leading AI tokens such as SingularityNet (AGIX), Fetch.ai (FET), Graph (GRT), Worldcoin ($WLD), and Render (RNDR) went into hyperdrive, pushing the AI token market cap past the $16.5B mark.

Frothiness aside, there are significant challenges on the road to delivering value, including the scarcity of computational resources and the need for enhanced security — problems two companies are attempting to address.

Fetch.ai, which bills itself as the first open platform for AI agents, is investing $100MM to launch Fetch Compute, a user and developer platform powered by Nvidia. FET holders can accumulate Fetch Compute Credits that they can use to cover usage fees. Meanwhile, the Fetch.ai Foundation, a Netherlands-based nonprofit governed by Fetch.ai, and Bosch, a global manufacturer of IoT connected products, has formed a partnership with DePIN-focused blockchain peaq to use connected devices in the economy of things.

On the security front, French startup Zama raised ($) $73MM in series A funding to further develop its homomorphic encryption technology, which allows computations to be performed on decentralized and encrypted data. Developers don’t need to know cryptography to be able to use it in applications.

Read more →CCN

Speed, Programming, and Pedigree: Inside the Rise of Sui

Launched in May 2023, Layer-1 blockchain Sui has quickly risen to prominence. With over $500M in TVL and a market cap of $1.92B, it recently overtook Cardano and Aptos to become fourteenth largest DeFi protocol and the sixty-third-largest crypto by market cap at time of writing. Scallop Lend and Navi Protocol, two lending applications on Sui, have both seen TVL quadruple since the turn of the year, contributing to the network’s growth. Sui is growing in other ways as well. In February, it launched a blockchain school in the UAE; in March, it announced it is in the exploratory stages of building a solution for the Athens Stock Exchange.

What’s behind Sui’s rise? An intriguing pedigree, a unique programming language, and wicked fast speed.

Sui traces its lineage to Diem, Facebook’s discontinued effort to build a permissioned blockchain and digital wallet as the foundation of a worldwide payment network. Five former Diem developers took that tech playbook and started Mysten Labs, which developed Sui. Mysten has raised money from a number of high-profile investors: a 2021 $36MM Series A led by a16z and a $300MM series B round led by a who’s who of crypto, tech, and TradFi firms that gave it unicorn status. Mysten itself just announced its participation in an $8MM Series B for Elixir, a modular liquidity protocol.

Sui utilizes its own version of Move, a language the founders helped to create at Facebook. Unlike account-centric programming languages commonly used by blockchains, Move is object-centric, making it possible for assets to be shared between multiple owners. It is remarkably fast with a time to finality of 480 milliseconds; it can handle 297,000 transactions per second (TPS). By way of comparison, Visa can process 65,000 TPS; Solana can reportedly handle up to 65,000 while Ethereum can currently process 13.

While at Facebook, Sui’s founders had the goal of making the process of “sending money as easy as email” as Sui CPO Adeniyi Abidoun told The Block. That is still their vision; they believe the complexity of using cryptocurrency has been a hurdle for the average person, a situation they hope to remedy.

Read more →Blockworks

News In Brief

Business of Crypto

• Mastercard and MetaMask Test Blockchain-Powered Credit Card — CoinDesk
• Deutsche Börse Launches Institutional Crypto Trading Platform — The Block
• Bitcoin Mining Revenue Hits New Daily Record — Bloomberg ($)

Regulation and Security

• Insider Trading Case Ruling Backs U.S. SEC: Secondary Sales Are Still Securities Sales — Fortune ($)
• Thai SEC Greenlights ETF Trading for Institutions, Wealthy Individuals — CoinDesk
• Nigeria Detains Two Binance Execs, Alleging Firm Crashed its Currency- CoinTelegraph

DeFi and Web3

• Farcaster Users, Revenues Plummet as Interest in New Feature Wanes — The Defiant
• Eclipse Labs Raises $50MM to Build Ethereum Layer-2 Using the Solana Virtual Machine — The Block
• Wyoming Passes Bill to Support DAO Expansion in the State — The Defiant

Midweek Market Pulse

Total Market Cap: $2.70T — 7 day change as of Tuesday 3/12/24 12 PM EST: +10.2%

Chart and quotes via CoinMarketCap

The total crypto market cap skyrocketed 10.2% to $2.7T as Bitcoin (BTC, +7.1%) crossed $70,000 for the first time, surpassing the $1.37T market cap of silver before settling in as the eighth most valuable asset in the world, just behind Alphabet. Ethereum (ETH, +5.3%) hit its own milestone of $4,000 before receding slightly; the network is scheduled to implement Dencun today. The upgrade will improve scalability and cost for Ethereum’s many layer-2s.

Meanwhile, BNB (BNB, +30.3%) hit a two-year high on rising activity on the BNB Chain; Dapp volume is up more than 40 percent over the past month. As the native token of Binance, BNB may also be benefitting from several outages at rival Coinbase during the current rally.

Layer-1s like Solana (SOL, +7.6%) and Avalanche (AVAX, +21.6%) continued upward while Toncoin (TON, +35.8%) and Near Protocol (NEAR, +71.5%) had monster weeks. TON hit a two-year high on news that Telegram may go public. Near is gaining momentum ahead of Nvidia’s annual conference where Near co-founder and CEO Illia Polosukhin will speak on a panel called “Transforming AI.” Other AI cryptos like Render (RNDR, +59.6%), The Graph (GRT, +47.6%), and Fetch.ai (FET, +53.5%) all turned in strong performances.

While Dogecoin (DOGE, -2.2%) and Shiba Inu (SHIB, -5.9%) cooled, other dog-themed coins like Floki Inu (FLOKI, +120.7%) and Dogwifhat (WIF, +52.3%) continued the memecoin rally. New data showed memecoin trading on Ethereum generated $6.4B of volume in February, a 61% increase from January; they are also driving record volumes on Solana DEX.

The Last Word

Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Noun

: Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) lets third parties run computations on encrypted data without revealing the underlying data.

/ FHE could solve many privacy concerns and is of high interest to organizations around the world.

About BitGo

BitGo provides the most secure and scalable solutions for the digital asset economy, offering regulated custody, borrowing and lending, and core infrastructure to investors and builders alike.

Founded in 2013 — the early days of crypto — BitGo pioneered the multi-signature wallet and later built TSS to improve upon other companies’ MPC offerings. Between multi-sig and TSS, BitGo offers the safest technology on the market and safeguards over 600 tokens across a wide variety of blockchains.

Over the years, BitGo has expanded from offering wallets into providing a full-suite solution that lets clients hold assets safely and then put them to work.

BitGo launched BitGo Trust Company in 2018, providing fully regulated, qualified cold storage to complement BitGo Inc’s original hot wallet solution. In 2020, BitGo launched BitGo Prime, which allows its clients to trade, borrow, and lend. Moreover, BitGo also provides access to DeFi, staking, NFT wallets, and beyond, and serves as the world’s sole custodian for WBTC, or wrapped Bitcoin.

Today, BitGo is the leader in digital asset security, custody, and liquidity, providing the operational backbone for more than 1500 institutional clients in over 50 countries — a list that includes many regulated entities and the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms. BitGo also processes approximately 20% of all global Bitcoin transactions by value.

For more information, please visit www.bitgo.com.

©2024 BitGo Inc. (collectively with its affiliates and subsidiaries, “BitGo”). All rights reserved. BitGo Trust Company, Inc., BitGo Inc., and BitGo Prime LLC are separately operated, wholly-owned subsidiaries of BitGo Holdings, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. No legal, tax, investment, or other advice is provided by any BitGo entity. Please consult your legal/tax/investment professional for questions about your specific circumstances. Digital asset holdings involve a high degree of risk, and can fluctuate greatly on any given day. Accordingly, your digital asset holdings may be subject to large swings in value and may even become worthless. The information provided herein is not intended for distribution to, or use by, any person or entity in any jurisdiction or country where such distribution or use would be contrary to law or regulation. BitGo is not directing this information to any person in any jurisdiction where the publication or availability of the information is prohibited, by reason of that person’s citizenship, residence or otherwise.