OKX Pleads Guilty & Pays ~$500M

️ On today's Top Picks:

Crypto News

• ⭐️ OKX subsidiary pleads guilty and pays over $500M in penalties for illegally serving US customers; to pay $84M fine and forgo $421M in revenue.

• ⭐️ Bybit returns to 1:1 backing of client assets and closes Ethereum $ETH gap; Bybit hacked for $1.4B last Friday.

• Bybit launches Bounty Recovery Program; offers 10% bounty to anyone who assists in recovering funds from $1.4B hack.

• eXch crypto exchange denies money-laundering allegations; some funds from Bybit hack were traced to eXch over the weekend.

• ⭐️ Strategy $MSTR buys 20,356 Bitcoin $BTC for ~$1.99B at ~$97,514 per BTC; holds 499,096 BTC worth ~$46B.

• Pump[.]fun tests own AMM; pump tokens may graduate on Pump[.]fun AMM instead of Raydium; Raydium $RAY falls ~29%.

• US SEC acknowledges filing for Grayscale's spot Cardano $ADA ETF.

• Canary Capital files 19b-4 for Hedera $HBAR spot ETF with US SEC; filed an amended S-1 last week.

• Digital Asset Investment Products saw $508M of outflows last week; Bitcoin $BTC $571M of outflows, Ethereum $ETH $3.7M of inflows, Solana $SOL $8.9M of inflows, Ripple $XRP $38.3M of inflows.

Alpha

• ⭐️ Babylon launches Babylon Foundation; posts "Hello World" on X; TGE & airdrop to potentially launch soon.

• Newton launches Newtonian Gold NFT mint on Guild; Newton is a ZK L2 by Magic Labs.

• Avantis launches XP Quests, a recurring community competition with 50K XP and boosts up for grabs every week; XP Season 2 ongoing.

• Blockscout launches Public Goods Supporter Badge; anyone who donated to projects in GG22 OSS Developer Tools or ENS Ecosystem rounds can mint.

• ICYMI Movement Labs Co-founder posts "loading…" on X; to potentially launch public mainnet soon.

Airdrops

• Weekly Airdrop Recap by Earndrop.

• Monad Airdrop Strategy by Earndrop.

• ICYMI Kernel to launch $KERNEL season 1 airdrop soon; 10% of KERNEL supply allocated to season 1 airdrop.

• ICYMI Kaito launches $KAITO airdrop claim; Genesis NFT holders, Kaito Yaps holders, & more are eligible.

• ICYMI Paradex Airdrop Strategy by Earndrop.

• ICYMI Triad Airdrop Strategy by Earndrop.

Finance News

• Michael Saylor, Founder & Chairman of Strategy $MSTR, met with US SEC crypto task force; discussed framework for digital assets.

• Strategy $MSTR completes $2B convertible notes offering; to use proceeds for general corporate purposes, including to buy more Bitcoin $BTC.

• Citadel Securities to become a liquidity provider for cryptocurrencies; aims to be a market maker for several crypto exchanges.

• US SEC closes investigation into Robinhood $HOOD crypto operations with no intention of pursuing an enforcement action; Robinhood received a Wells Notice from the SEC in May 2024.

• Apple $AAPL to invest $500B in the US over the next four years; to add ~20K research and development jobs.

• DekaBank, a $377B German asset manager; launches crypto trading and custody services for institutional clients; offerings were in development for two years.

Security and Exploits

• Infini exploited for ~$49M due to compromised administrative privileges; impacted users to be compensated.

• Safe $SAFE begins phased rollout to restore Safe{Wallet} services; includes additional layer of security measures; paused services last Friday due to Bybit hack.

• Wallet Guard to sunset extension, dashboard & snap on March 31st; all features are now directly within MetaMask; Consensys acquired WalletGuard in July 2024.

• Revoke[.]cash adds support for Abstract AGW Sessions.

• Australia bans Kaspersky products on government systems; cites threat and risk analysis shows Kaspersky poses a security risk.

Token Unlocks

• Optimism $OP / ~$31M / FEB 28th
• Sui $SUI / ~$66M / MAR 01st
Sourced from Tokenomist

Funding

• ⭐️ Ethena $ENA raises $100M in Private funding from several investors.

• IMUA raises $5M in Seed funding led by Draper Dragon, No Limit Holdings, & Paramita.

• Tenor raises $2.5M in Seed funding led by Cherry Crypto.

• Memes Lab raises $2.3M in Seed funding led by Lemniscap.

• Torch Finance raises $1.5M in Pre-Seed funding led by TVM Ventures & Michael Egorov.

• EthicHub raises $1M in funding from Bybit.

• Vana $VANA raises an undisclosed amount in Strategic funding from YZi Labs.

• Knidos raises an undisclosed amount in funding from Avalanche Foundation & Emin Gün Sirer.

The Degen Farmer