Parse notes
MicroStrategy's Bitcoin holdings have surpassed $20B in value, successfully achieving an ROI of over 100% as Bitcoin's price exceeded $80,000. The company will continue to increase its Bitcoin reserves by raising $42B over the next three years.
Bitcoin hit a new all-time high of $80,000, leading to a total weekly gain of 15%. The premium on futures contracts, which give the buyer the right to buy Bitcoin at a future date for a set price, has soared, indicating a continued bullish sentiment.
Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) has released AgentKit, a model-agnostic toolkit for giving AI agents access to any onchain functionality alongside access to web2 APIs. Built in Python and powered by LangChain, the goal of AgentKit is to be both powerful yet simple to use. Out-of-the-box features include memecoin deployment on a bonding curve, access to posting on X, and arbitrary smart contract invocations. Going forward, CDP plans to highlight user-created agent templates and curate a community of agent builders.
Futarchy has introduced a platform that uses prediction markets to make organizational decisions and address misaligned incentives in DAOs. The platform creates conditional markets for proposals where participants can trade on share prices under different outcomes, allowing the market to determine the holders. Futarchy aims to evolve governance into a broader system for aggregating global information through interconnected markets.
In this post, Vitalik Buterin explores the concept of “info finance” – deliberately designed markets that elicit specific information from participants, with prediction markets being one early example. These systems can create better implementations of social media, science, news, and governance through mechanisms like distilled human judgment and decision markets. AI could enable efficient micro-markets by solving the problem of low volume. The convergence of scalable blockchains, growing trust issues, and AI capabilities make this the perfect time for info finance to take off.
The Ethereum Foundation reported $134.9M in spending for 2023, with a current treasury of $970.2M, 81% of which is in crypto. This year, it introduced a new conflict of interest policy and supported the growth of independent ecosystem organizations. $22.2B is being held across various project treasuries across the ecosystem and nearly $500M was deployed for ecosystem support in 2022-23.
KAST is launching a global on-ramp to USDC via SWIFT with fees between 0%-0.1% and a $10k minimum. The surface will initially be offered in Asia but the team expects to expand soon to the U.S., Europe, and the UAE. They hope to make stablecoin access frictionless for compliant customers.
Optimism is high for a more supportive regulatory environment in the U.S. crypto space following recent elections. There is potential for bipartisan progress that will enable consumer-focused innovation in areas like digital identity, stablecoins, and decentralized networks. Clearer rules are anticipated to support good actors while protecting consumers, allowing projects to embrace tokens and decentralization with greater confidence.
David Bailey, CEO of Bitcoin Magazine, claims that an unnamed country has become a top five Bitcoin holder.
Bitcoin's recent surge to $80K is expected to fuel bullish momentum in Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Sui (SUI), and Aave (AAVE).
For new crypto founders: prioritize a 36-month runway in short-term U.S. T-bills, avoid leverage and derivatives, and focus on early launches and user-driven iteration.
Praxis recently secured $525 million in financing to build a new city.