1. Former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Finance of China: Fundamental changes in US encryption policy. How should China respond?

On September 28, 2024, Zhu Guangyao, former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Finance of China, said at the 2024 Tsinghua PBC Chief Economist Forum that the digital economy has a special asset "cryptocurrency". Over the past decade, the United States has generally believed that cryptocurrency has huge destructive power and market risks. However, since 2024, the US encryption policy has undergone a fundamental change. China needs to study the latest changes and policy adjustments in the world. Zhu Guangyao bluntly stated that the gap between China and the United States in cryptocurrency "is that China does not participate" and called for facing the problems and solving them in regulation. Click to read

2.Coinbase: Outlook for the Q4 Crypto Market in 2024

Our impression from the Token2049 conference was that the sentiment among cryptocurrency investors seemed quite positive, although this may have something to do with the fact that the event coincided with the Federal Reserve's 50 basis point rate cut on September 18. However, while many market participants are bullish on BTC, we encountered some skeptics about ETH, as the token does not seem to have benefited from the launch of the spot ETH ETF in the United States more than two months ago. (Note that many attribute this to the recent surge in Ethereum Layer 2 activity, but we’ve previously explained why we believe this is an incomplete explanation for ETH’s underperformance relative to its peers.) Additionally, some argue that there are more higher-beta instruments (like L2 tokens) benchmarked to ETH today than in the previous cycle, which is leading to a crowding-out effect. Click to read

3. Variant co-founder: The next ten years of smart contract blockchain

The first ten years of smart contract blockchain were born out of Bitcoin’s original cypherpunk values: anti-censorship, open source, no permission required, and a new hope of building a democratic/fair Internet on a shared world computer. Click to read

4. Why does the "Fat Protocol Theory" no longer work in the current crypto environment?

The "Fat Protocol Thesis" has done great harm to the field and set us back several years. In fact, I like the "Fat Protocol Thesis" very much, and if you haven't read it, I strongly recommend you to read it. The simple version of this theory is that protocols (such as blockchains) will capture more value than the applications built on them.Why? Part of the reason is that crypto applications have weak moats (they are easily copied). But the main reason is that the success of applications will drive users to accumulate protocol tokens for use, thereby creating a network effect for the blockchain, because each application will drive up the token price of the chain it is built on. Click to read

5. Prospects and opportunities of chain abstraction

In this year's narrative competition, the growth of chain abstract narrative reached 673% (but the top four are still AI, DeFi, Meme, L2, etc.). My view on this is still the same: "Demand drives growth, and growth brings hype" - at least now the market's attention to the chain abstraction track comes from some of the problems encountered by the current industry, such as the complexity brought by multiple chains and cross-chain messaging. The development process of these narratives is a bit like "adding noodles when there is too much water, and adding water when there is too much noodles". Ethereum's performance is limited, so everyone is working on Layer1 and Layer2 in order to solve the congestion caused by user growth. When chains are accidentally built too much, everyone puts their hopes on new technologies, such as chain abstraction and intent abstraction, hoping that they can solve the complexity brought by the development of multiple chains. Click to read