Vitalik Buterin Donates 100 ETH

️ On today's Top Picks:

Crypto News

• ⭐️ Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin donates 100 Ethereum $ETH (~$340K) to Tornado Cash $TORN developer Alexey Pertsev on Juicebox $JBX.

• Binance Labs $BNB to rebrand soon with expanded investment scope; Binance Co-founder CZ to increase involvement.

• ⭐️ Terra Co-founder Do Kwon extradited to the US from Montenegro; ends standoff between US & South Korea over competing extradition demands.

• Pump[.]fun Team deposits ~292K Solana $SOL (~$55M) to Kraken; has deposited ~1.5M SOL (~$303M) to Kraken in total.

• Usual's $USD0 stablecoin briefly dipped to $0.99 after whale sell-off; fully re-pegged after a few hours.

Alpha

• Caldera pauses Caldera Wrapped 2024 campaign; last three quests to return for 24 hours on January 5th.

• PumpBTC launches Thank You Satoshi campaign; mint a Pizza NFT for a future PumpBTC airdrop.

• Treehouse launches Decentralized Offered Rates Testnet; Mainnet to launch in Q1.

• Newton posts "Crystal NFT claim starts 01.02.25 ... Only in Discord" on X; Newton is a ZK L2 by Magic Labs.

• Trusta Labs teases providing services for "two giants whose names cannot be disclosed yet."; previously provided services for Celestia, Starknet, & more.

• ⭐️ Lens teases "Lens mainnet is imminent"; Hey (Lens client) recently announced Lens v2 signups would close soon.

• 2025 Crypto January Calendar by LayerGG.

Airdrops

• ⭐️ Sonic SVM to launch $SONIC airdrop claim January 7th; airdrop eligibility checker to launch January 3rd; snapshot taken December 31st.

• WalletConnect $WCT season 1 airdrop claim closes January 3rd; claim & stake to earn rewards.

• SyncSwap launches SyncSwap V3; $SYNC token generation event coming soon.

• Robinhood airdrops $2.5M worth of Bitcoin to Gold members in celebration of New Year.

• ICYMI Initia Airdrop Strategy by Earndrop.

• ICYMI ZKsync $ZK airdrop claim closes January 3rd; unclaimed tokens to be sent to the Token Assembly.

• Potential Top TGE Projects In Q1 2025 by Wu Blockchain.

Finance News

• Over $7.11 Trillion added to the US stock market in 2024.

• ⭐️ BRICS adds 9 new countries as partner countries; Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda, & Uzbekistan.

• HIVE Digital $HIVE relocates head office from Vancouver, Canada to Texas, US; cites favorable regulatory conditions & access to a more robust capital market.

• Bit Digital $BTBT to deploy 576 Nvidia GPUs for high-performance computing; represents a revenue opportunity of ~$20.2M over two years.

• X to launch 'X Money' payment system in 2025; X recently obtained money transmission licenses & approval in several states.

Security and Exploits

• Alleged 7-Zip zero-day exploit leaks; 7-Zip author Igor Pavlov dismisses leak as fake & generated by AI.

• ICYMI US Treasury Department hacked by Chinese state-sponsored threat actors; breached through BeyondTrust remote support platform.

Token Unlocks

• Kaspa $KAS / ~$22M / JAN 06th
• Neon $NEON / ~$20M / JAN 07th
• Ethena $ENA / ~$13M / JAN 08th
Sourced from Tokenomist

Funding

• THENA raises an undisclosed amount in funding from Binance Labs.

The Degen Farmer