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.
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.
According to Cryptoslate, version 1.15.2 of Geth, a key client of the Ethereum protocol, has been released to fix a bug in the previous version that affected the creation of mainnet blocks. 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 expected network 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.
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.
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.”
According to FFNews, Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong), Animoca Brands and HKT have reached an agreement to establish a joint venture (JV) and plan to apply for a license from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) to issue stablecoins backed by Hong Kong dollars. Standard Chartered Bank has extensive experience in global stablecoin issuance and will provide the joint venture with banking-grade infrastructure and strict governance. Animoca Brands will use its expertise and network in the Web3 field to promote the development of the project. HKT will use its mobile wallet expertise to promote innovative stablecoin applications and facilitate domestic and cross-border payments.
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.
Linea completes Sybil attack appeal review and removes 3,500 misjudged addresses
Linea officially announced that it has completed the Sybil attack complaint review of the ecosystem and updated the Sybil list based on the review results. This review confirmed a total of 3,500 misjudged addresses and has removed them from the list. Users can check their account status through poh.linea.build.
Binance to launch GPS and SHELL perpetual contracts
Binance will launch the following two perpetual contracts with a maximum leverage of 25x: 2025-02-18 01:00 (GMT+8): GPSUSDT perpetual contract 2025-02-18 01:15 (GMT+8): SHELLUSDT perpetual contract
Michael Saylor releases "21 Rules for Bitcoin" to emphasize the unique value of Bitcoin
Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), tweeted a summary of the "21 Rules of Bitcoin". These rules emphasize the uniqueness of Bitcoin and its future importance, including: people who understand Bitcoin will buy it, while those who don't will criticize it; there is no end to learning about Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is driven by chaos; Bitcoin is the only "casino game" that we can all win; Bitcoin is the only thing you can truly own. In addition, he also mentioned that the funds used to buy Bitcoin should be the part that you "cannot afford to lose", and that Bitcoin is open to everyone, but requires the ability to think and understand. He called for respect for Bitcoin and the spread of Bitcoin with love.
According to CoinDesk, the Abu Dhabi branch of Brevan Howard Digital, a global investment management company, deployed $20 million in assets to the Kinto platform to participate in its on-chain financial ecosystem. Kinto is an Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that provides customized blockchain and smart contract wallets to support financial institutions in capital deployment while meeting strict compliance requirements. Kinto is the only L2 platform with built-in KYC and AML capabilities at the blockchain level, with default wallet insurance and comprehensive security features. Kinto's mining program rewards participants through asset deposits and will gradually distribute rewards over the next 10 years. Brevan Howard Digital became one of the first traditional financial institutions to participate in the program using digital assets.
Changpeng Zhao denies Binance sale rumors, but may introduce small equity investment
Binance founder CZ (Changpeng Zhao) tweeted that rumors about Binance (CEX) being sold are "nonsense". He made it clear that as a shareholder, Binance is not for sale, and said that top investors have always been interested in Binance and may allow small equity investments (single-digit percentages) in the future.
Regarding the rumors that Binance is about to be sold, He Yi, the co-founder of Binance, responded on the social platform that the recent crisis PR rumors may be competitors trying to divert attention from Binance by buying up articles in bulk. She emphasized that since the price of Bitcoin broke through a new high, Binance has continued to attract the attention of institutional investors, and every month institutions ask whether they are willing to accept investment and cooperation. She also said that Binance does not rule out the introduction of strategic partners and is willing to open up mergers and acquisitions, but if there are plans to sell other trading platforms, they are welcome to contact.
Binance will launch spot trading pairs such as BNX/USDC and TRUMP/FDUSD
Binance will launch BNX/USDC, CAKE/USDC, HEI/USDC, TRUMP/FDUSD and TST/FDUSD spot trading pairs at 16:00 (ET) on February 18, 2025, and will simultaneously open trading bot services for the above trading pairs.
CoinShares: Digital asset investment products saw a net outflow of $415 million last week
According to the latest weekly data from CoinShares, digital asset investment products experienced significant outflows for the first time after a record 19 weeks of continuous inflows, totaling $415 million. The main reason for the outflow was the hawkish remarks of Federal Reserve Chairman Powell and the US CPI data that exceeded expectations, which led to higher market expectations for interest rates. Bitcoin was the most affected, with outflows reaching $430 million. Most of the outflows came from the United States, reaching $464 million, while markets in other countries were relatively unaffected. Germany, Switzerland and Canada recorded inflows of $21 million, $12.5 million and $10.2 million, respectively. Solana was the asset with the most inflows, with an inflow of $8.9 million, followed by XRP ($8.5 million) and Sui ($6 million). In addition, blockchain stocks also attracted inflows of $20.8 million, and have attracted a total of $220 million in inflows so far this year.
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.
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.
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.
Argentina's main stock index falls more than 5.7% on Milei cryptocurrency scandal
According to Reuters, Argentina's main stock index fell more than 5.7% yesterday due to the cryptocurrency scandal related to presidential candidate Milei.
