“Forget the Federal Reserve. The Bitcoin and crypto project news flow is ample (and fascinating) enough to keep us busy. We’ve got the rundown plus $80M of fundraisings. In CoinDesk’s weekly newsletter on blockchain tech.”, — write: www.coindesk.com
- The new crypto project backed by former President Donald Trump (who in his spare time is campaigning as the Republican nominee in this year’s U.S. presidential election).
- How the Winklevoss twins got their father into bitcoin. (Ever wonder about their paternal phenotype?)
- The tale of a wild chartered plane ride – Dancing! Chanting! Mingling! – of crypto execs and influencers on their way to Token2049 in Singapore from Doha.
- Vitalik’s silent treatment.
- Ethereum’s ‘Pectra’ upgrade getting too gangly to push all at once.
- $80M+ of blockchain project fundraisings.
- Tokenized real-world assets climb past $12B.
- Fermah has announced its $5.2 million seed round, co-led by the a16z CSX fund and Lemniscap. According to the team, “Founded by seasoned cryptographer Vanishree Rao, who has dedicated the last 15 years to designing and building zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), Fermah is optimized for cheap, fast, and reliable ZKP generation, abstracting away the inherent complexity. Fermah generates proofs for any instance in which ZK is used – whether it’s for ZK rollups, ZK bridges, ZK coprocessors, ZKML projects or ZKFHE projects. Fermah is neutral and architected to support all proof systems, including zkVMs, zkEVMs, Groth16 and all other proof systems.”
- Hemi Labs, the team co-founded by legendary Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik, has raised $15 million in investment to develop and launch Hemi Network, a layer-2 blockchain that has been built on both Bitcoin and Ethereum, the company said on Wednesday.
- Also (details in
Protocol Village column): Fuse ($12M), Pipe ($10M) Gunzilla ($6M), Infinit ($6M), Cudis ($5M), Yellow ($10M), LogX ($4M), Wingbits ($3.5M), Titan ($3.5M), Limitless Labs ($3M), Universal Health Token ($1.2M)
Lumerin, an open-source Web3 data routing protocol, announced it’s added a new AI image generation feature to the chat interface of
Morpheus, a decentralized AI network, by integrating with
Prodia, the leading cloud platform for AI inference solutions. According to the team: “Morpheus chat users can now access a wide variety of AI models to quickly generate AI images at low cost. The news is another example of how the AI industry is using decentralized, Web3 solutions to lower AI compute costs and drive adoption for businesses and consumers.”
Redacted hosted 320 Web3 professionals on what was described as a “once-in-a-lifetime sky networking event” from Dubai to Singapore on Sept. 15 to attend this year’s
Token2049, according to the team: “Throughout the 10-hour flight via Doha, passengers were treated to non-stop entertainment, games, giveaways, networking and fun, with some of Web3’s top KOLs and influencers out of their seats mingling, chatting, dancing, jumping up and down, and
chanting ‘Redacted, Redacted, Redacted,’ before touching down at Singapore Changi International airport. On the Qatar Airways flight chartered by the Redacted team were key figures and partners from Polygon, Animoca Brands and Aethir, along with notable influencers such as Mario Nawfal, NFT whale Grail, Professor Crypto, Andres Meneses and the Crypto Banter team.”
- Nov. 10:
OP_NEXT Bitcoin scaling conference, Boston.
- Jan. 21-25:
WAGMI conference, Miami.