CZ, Justin Sun, Durov... Every founder of the crypto ecosystem is caught up in the huge waves of the market, some are calling the shots, some are thrown into jail, some are hiding their identities, some are leaving their hometowns, and the story of capital continues...
The capital market is like a game, and only by mastering the right strategy can you become the final winner.
With the arrest of Durov, founder and CEO of social media Telegram, at an airport near Paris, France, the subsequent impact of this incident continues to ferment.
The Paris prosecutor in charge of the case said in a statement that France has filed more than a dozen charges against Durov, and relevant French government departments are investigating illegal activities on the Telegram platform involving fraud, drug trafficking, organized crime, child pornography, promotion of terrorism, and dissemination of hacking tools. Durov was accused of not taking corresponding measures to prevent these crimes.
The TON chain ecosystem based on Telegram has shown an explosive trend since 2024. Telegram's Web3 soil has provided the soil for the TON chain ecosystem to fission in the community and ecology. After Durov was arrested, the TON network experienced two major load abnormality interruptions, and Toncoin also suffered a collapse of more than 20%. It currently has a market value of US$13.1 billion and has fallen to the tenth place in the market value of Crypto tokens.
Coincidentally, in the Crypto circle where money never sleeps, stories like Durov's are played out every day.
Many powerful underworld tycoons have been jailed. SBF, the founder of FTX, a US cryptocurrency trading platform known as the "King of Cryptocurrency", was sentenced to 25 years in prison in the United States for stealing $8 billion from customers; Kwon DO, the founder of Terra, who single-handedly triggered the black swan event and caused the serial bankruptcy of Three Arrows Capital, BlockFi, FTX, and Silvergate, and the number one person in the Korean cryptocurrency circle, was detained in Montenegro awaiting subsequent trial; Affected by the Terra case, Zhu Su, co-founder of Three Arrows Capital, was arrested when he tried to leave Singapore; Zhao Changpeng (CZ), the founder of Binance, which has the halo of the richest Chinese and the reputation of the largest exchange, was sentenced to 4 months in prison for money laundering violations and violations of US sanctions, and is still serving his sentence in the United States.
In addition to these bigwigs, the FBI has been committed to digging out the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of the BTC network. XRP has just won a phased "victory" in the century-long lawsuit with the SEC some time ago, but the SEC's silent attitude seems to indicate that this storm has not yet completely ended. Sun Yuchen, who has always been standing under the spotlight and is known as the richest man born in the 1990s in the currency circle, and his Tron, like a delicate puppeteer, has been trying to weave his own story under the scrutiny and investigation of Chinese and American regulators.
Recently, OpenSea received the SEC Wells Notice, an informal reminder issued by the US SEC before civil lawsuits against US-listed companies, becoming another crypto project targeted by the SEC after CoinBase, Li-do, Bittex, Uniswap, and Robinhood.
It seems that every crypto star will be involved in the gray area of supervision and law and be subject to the hammer of strong supervision. On the one hand, the entire crypto industry is thriving, the public chain ecosystem is springing up, the GameFI ecosystem has become a life-saving straw for the grassroots people in Southeast Asia, and the power of crypto has begun to infiltrate and influence the US election. BTC is expected to become a US strategic reserve after Trump enters the White House. On the other hand, crypto companies and exchanges are dancing on the tightrope, waiting for the judgment of fate under the sword of Damocles of compliance, money laundering and counter-terrorism. Similarly, most cryptocurrency developers, whether for security considerations or for the belief in decentralization, choose to remain anonymous. Since the birth of the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, in the 16-year time dimension, the Crypto industry has been surging, and the changes in technology and the rise and fall of business stories are like a stream of carp washing over the reefs of the times. When we look back, we see that the vivid characters under the imprint of the times are deeply trapped in the quagmire of fate.
Unlike many Web3 bigwigs who are stuck in the quagmire, Telegram founder Durov, known as the "cyber Robin Hood" and "Russian Zuckerberg", and his Telegram became famous in the traditional business world. This talented developer who is outside the regulatory system is a rebel in the eyes of various governments, but in Durov's eyes, he is just a liberal. In his view, wealth and obedience to regulation are never more important than freedom.
"I am not fighting for freedom, but using my existence to prove that freedom has not disappeared. "—— Durov once said. As early as 2006, relying on Zuckerberg's FaceBook inspiration, Durov and his brother created the VK social platform in Russia and achieved great success in the Russian-speaking world. Although VK made him financially free, it caused many frictions with the Russian government over regulatory issues. The Russian Federal Security Service once asked VK to hand over some personal information of those who took the lead in inciting the Kiev issue on the Internet, but was severely rejected by Durov. The fate of a business individual against a state power can be imagined. In the VK incident, Durov angrily denounced the Russian government and the big capital that was preparing to acquire VK. Although his personal wealth was enough to rank among the top of the wealth circle, Durov was like a poor programmer who shouted for technology and freedom, fighting against the entire powerful world. The final chapter of the story came to an abrupt end after the armed forces raided Durov's home at night. Durov lost control of VK and was eventually acquired by Mail.ru, a company close to the Kremlin. This spirit of not fearing power and advocating liberalism later evolved into the cultural core of Telegram and was praised by the Crypto circle. In 2013, Durov and his brother Nikolay founded the instant messaging software Telegram, which currently has more than 1 billion users worldwide. This time Durov had only one goal: to create a free software and put the protection of personal freedom and privacy first. To achieve this goal, Durov sold his VK shares and cleared his properties in Russia, then left Russia and moved to Dubai. Dubai has since become Telegram's headquarters, and Durov has begun his wandering life. Having learned from the VK incident, in addition to Russian citizenship, Durov also obtained citizenships of the United Arab Emirates, France, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. Like the icon of a paper airplane, it can fly in all directions. Telegram, a social software with more than 1 billion users worldwide, is known as the world's most secure and anonymous chat platform with end-to-end encryption. The encryption mode of its application is based on 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie-Hellman secure key exchange protocol, using two-point direct transmission and key encryption, no third-party server retention and cannot be deciphered, and the software provides a self-destructing function.
Durov's attitude of not wanting to include Telegram in the regulatory system of content review in various countries, this extreme romantic liberalism quickly attracted countless users to Telegram, but it is like a double-edged sword, becoming the preferred social software in the crypto world, and also providing a convenient hotbed for terrorism, making mainstream countries feel like a thorn in their backs and a thorn in their throats.
The ecological development of the TON blockchain is a very important part of the realization of Telegram's business model. On the one hand, as a technology geek, Durov himself is a supporter of Crypto. At the same time, Telegram's privacy protection almost ruined the road to commercial advertising realization, and the huge user base and the prosperity of community culture are simply the nourishment of the Crypto public chain. The strategic significance of TON is to provide Telegram users with fast and secure decentralized payments and digital identities. Based on this attribute, TON must be a high-performance public chain. Scalability and sharding have become the path for TON's development. This is also the reason why the TON ecosystem finally chose the asynchronous architecture - although it will be restricted in some areas, large-scale user applications are the problems that TON needs to solve.
An interesting point is that the advertising traffic monetization of Telegram's public channels is ultimately achieved through TON.
At present, the TON ecosystem relies on the exposure and viral marketing based on Telegram's huge user base and TON's technical support. With ecological payment and wallet as the bottom layer, GameFi, NFT, and MeMe projects have obtained a user base and rapid growth that exceeds that of general Crypto. For example, the DOGS and Notcoin projects have accumulated millions of users in a short period of time. It can be said that the beginning of the bull market in 2024 is Bitcoin ETF, and the hot spots of the narrative are MeMe and DePIN, so the strongest public chain is definitely the hot fried chicken TON.
But after Durov was arrested, the development of TON ecology will slowly raise a question mark.
In fact, Telegram's legal risks have always surrounded Durov. As early as after the Paris attacks in 2015, Telegram was accused by France of not fulfilling its obligations on anti-terrorism issues. This time Durov was arrested, and the French government accused Telegram of refusing to respond when the authorities asked it to investigate illegal actions on the platform, and Durov also did nothing when he knew that there were criminal activities on the platform.
Against the backdrop of countries' fight against terrorism, political disputes and "participants" in local wars, Telegram has become a thorn in the eyes of governments, especially in this Russia-Ukraine conflict, where it has become a communication tool for both sides of the war. The Western camp has tried to obtain Russian communications more than once. Many experts analyzed that Durov's arrest this time was also due to geopolitical needs.
Currently, Durov has provided a 5 million euro deposit and is prohibited from leaving French territory. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Under such high pressure, it may be difficult for him to stick to his pursuit of freedom.
As for the direct impact on the TON ecosystem, after Durov was arrested, two major interruptions occurred in the blockchain network, causing block production to stagnate, which triggered local panic and caused a drop of more than 20%. After the short-term withdrawal of liquidity, the next serious problem is that due to the sniping of Western countries, the user community of the TON ecosystem has attracted exchanges in the past, but now it is necessary to consider risk control. In the past, several heavyweight projects were expected to be listed on Binance, but now similar expectations may be dashed. But fortunately, the TON ecosystem is decentralized enough, and the bridge between Web 2 and Web 3 built by Telegram and TON does not seem to be affected by the Durov incident for a long time. The real test for TON is, if the Telegram ecosystem is really regulated and backdoors are left, can its ecosystem continue to prosper?
In the Crypto industry where wealth effects gather and money never sleeps, on the edge of money and power, at the center of the real and virtual world, the story of CZ, the former "Chinese Richest Man" who once topped the Forbes list, and even throughout human history, the founder of Binance, is legendary. Even the most staunch Bitcoin believers rarely have the courage and determination of CZ. When Bitcoin skyrocketed to more than $200, CZ, who had just read the Bitcoin white paper, had the courage to go all in. He sold his house in Shanghai and bought all his Bitcoins. This marked the beginning of his legendary life. CZ had been dealing with securities trading for the first half of his life. When he came into contact with the Crypto industry, CZ, who was sensitive to trading, soon discovered that this industry was not only full of primitive opportunities, but also full of barbarity and fraud. Even at that time, the main trading scene for Bitcoin was the dark web. And it was precisely this rampant illegal trading that was rapidly driving the price of Bitcoin up.
After only one year in the industry, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox collapsed, and 750,000 Bitcoins were lost due to suspected embezzlement. CZ, who saw the opportunity, launched his own exchange, Binance, in 2017. An exchange that sounded safe enough, which was also the most simple hope of everyone in the market at that time.
The turning point came after the issuance of the 94 document. After the ICO was cleared, Binance ushered in a rapid accumulation of registrations due to the full clearing according to the price after the increase. Under the increasingly stringent domestic regulatory system, CZ and his Binance began to go overseas, opening the curtain of his digital nomadism.
Unlike the domestic market, which has been baptized by the market and is highly involuted, Binance is like a fish in water in the overseas market. Five months after its launch, Binance attracted 6 million users with its efficient performance, covering more than 180 countries, and its daily trading volume exceeded US$3 billion. It also became the world's largest Crypto exchange. But the friction between Binance and the traditional world began from the moment when its size began to expand. The earliest conflict was with the investment giant Sequoia Capital. Sequoia Capital is known as the number one in the equity investment industry of classical investment. Since Sequoia Capital's process from valuation to later background adjustment to investment is too long, CZ bluntly said: The valuation you give is too low now. Turned to negotiate with IDG. Although CZ said that he was talking to IDG about Series B financing, under the high pressure of Sequoia Capital and the intervention of the court, IDG's investment eventually fell through. After Binance's complete rise, CZ launched a counterattack, and all projects related to Sequoia Capital could not be listed on Binance.
However, Binance's globalization strategy soon ushered in the first problem: due to the lax KYC process and the wild growth around the world, a lot of money from unknown sources began to be traded through Binance. Especially in the countries and regions on the US Treasury's list of high-risk areas, the US government suspects that there may be drugs, terrorism, child abuse, etc.
In May 2021, Bloomberg released a report saying that Binance was facing money laundering and tax evasion investigations from the United States. In August 2021, Binance began to require customers to provide KYC information.
Binance's real troubles come from the struggle with FTX and the high-pressure control of the US government behind the global Crypto market. In this commercial war, the FTX business empire collapsed overnight in less than 10 days, and CZ was the one who nailed the last nail in the coffin. After Alameda Research's liquidity problem was exposed, SBF began to put out emergency measures, while CZ said that he was worried about a Luna-style collapse and would sell FTT. The tit-for-tat was evident in their words. After SBF reached an acquisition plan with Binance after failing to save the situation, Binance tore up the agreement and said it would give up the acquisition of FTX. This was the last straw that broke the camel's back and finally completed the demise of FTX. But Binance's attitude may have really annoyed people on Wall Street and in the White House. It was not only that Binance's failure to rescue FTX led to a systemic financial crisis in the U.S. market, but more importantly, the U.S. could not tolerate the world's top digital currency exchange not being under its control.
Regulatory issues from various countries have come to Zhao Changpeng one after another. The problems left by the wild growth era have forced Binance to frequently face inquiries from traditional regulatory authorities. The Singapore Police Force has launched a financial crime investigation into Binance. The Dubai Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority has asked Binance to provide more information about its audit procedures. In March 2023, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the U.S. Treasury Department sued CZ and Binance for multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and related regulations. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice has also filed a number of criminal charges against CZ. Binance has been charged with three counts, including violations of money laundering regulations, conspiracy to conduct unlicensed money transfer business, and violations of U.S. sanctions, and the core of the charges faced by Binance is concentrated on violations of anti-money laundering regulations.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said that the Binance platform is crowded with criminals from all over the world, who use Binance to transfer various types of illegal funds and other criminal proceeds through cryptocurrencies. The U.S. Treasury Department said Binance's violations included failure to prevent and report suspicious transactions with terrorists, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Court documents show that Binance allowed at least 1.1 million related transactions, amounting to more than $898 million, involving Iranian customers. After repeated weighing and negotiations, Binance and its CEO CZ admitted to multiple criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice. In addition, Binance will pay a criminal fine of $1.8 billion and forfeit $2.5 billion. The total fine is $4.3 billion, of which $3.4 billion will be paid to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network Bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department and another $968 million will be paid to the Treasury Department's sanctions department. This is the largest fine to date by the U.S. Treasury Department. Binance will also completely withdraw from the U.S. market, Binance.US's Binance US subsidiary will continue to operate in the United States, CZ agreed to resign as Binance CEO and was banned from holding any leadership position in Binance.
On April 30, U.S. District Judge Richard Jones sentenced CZ to four months in a Seattle jail, with his current release date set for September 29. There is no doubt that if CZ eventually retires, he will be a life winner in this industry. Even if he is imprisoned now, even if such a sentence may affect Binance's long-term low position in the future - after all, Binance was able to rise because of market opportunities, and now they leave opportunities to latecomers.
It is still unknown how long Binance can sit on the top spot, Binance has always performed well in the spot and derivatives trading markets. However, recently, its share of trading volume has been declining. According to data from The Block, Binance's share of the spot market has dropped from more than 62% earlier this year to 37%. In the futures market, Binance's leading position in open contracts has also been surpassed by CME.
On the other hand, the performance of BNB and BSC has also weakened. In the face of the impact of new public chains and the decline in trading share, how long can Binance maintain its current leading low position is not only a question mark.
But at least, CZ's ten years in Crypto are full of legendary colors.
If we talk about the most famous Chinese entrepreneur in Crypto, besides CZ, Justin Sun is the first.
Speaking of Justin Sun, the man who founded TRON and has the most advanced marketing methods and a nose for opportunities, is full of controversial labels - Peking University genius, plagiarist, entrepreneur, cryptocurrency upstart, overnight rich, hype master, worth billions, Jia Yueting in the cryptocurrency circle, Buffett lunch terminator, ambassador of Grenada, etc.
Sun Yuchen founded TRON in 2017 when ICO was the hottest. In TRON's white paper, Sun Yuchen envisioned "a decentralized free content entertainment system on a global scale". However, the TRON white paper at that time was criticized by many industry insiders for its lack of technological innovation and its plagiarism of Ethereum. This later caused Vitalik Buterin and Sun Yuchen to fight each other on social media.
But in 2017, which was full of bubbles, under the promotion of marketing expert Justin Sun, the names of Wu Jihan, Li Feng, Shuai Chu, Dai Wei and others appeared in the private placement list of TRON. Despite the doubts of "air coins", TRON issued 100 billion TRON coins and raised about 400 million yuan through ICO. TRON also took off smoothly under this wave, and Justin Sun truly achieved his wealth goal.
By 2018, the market value of TRON successfully broke through the top ten virtual currencies in the world.
In addition to the success of TRON, Justin Sun seems to have an ability to put pressure on the high-return track every time and cash out without hesitation. There has been a joke on social media: Brother Sun smiles, life and death are unpredictable.
When TRON was rising the most, Justin Sun sent 200 million TRX to the exchange for Ethereum for 19 consecutive days, which invisibly formed a market crash to cash out. As for the story of the investment interest dispute between Justin Sun and Martian Xu Zijing, which has been circulating in the market, Xu Zijing has remained silent.
In 2019, Justin Sun spent $4.56 million to bid for Buffett's lunch. At that time, Justin Sun was deeply mired in the controversy of the Super TRON Community scam. During the entire publicity process, the Super TRON Community has always emphasized its close connection with TRON, but TRON and Justin Sun have not strongly refuted it. It was not until the TRON Super Community ran away that Justin Sun came forward to clarify that the project had nothing to do with TRON. Obviously, such rhetoric cannot convince everyone. Even when Justin Sun sent a Weibo to refute the rumor, the name of the TRON Super Community was not mentioned throughout the process.
Soon after the Super TRON Community incident, Caixin suddenly broke the news: After investigation and confirmation, since June 2018, the regulatory authorities have issued border control orders to some sensitive identities in the Crypto industry, including Justin Sun. The Office of the National Internet Financial Risk Special Rectification Group has recommended that the public security organs file a case against Justin Sun for suspected illegal fundraising, money laundering, pornography, gambling and other issues.
In response, Justin Sun immediately hit back at the false report. "The Caixin report is completely untrue. I am fine. I will meet with the outside world after my condition recovers. I am sorry to worry everyone."
At the same time, Justin Sun posted two tweets on his Twitter, both of which showed his home in San Francisco and the iconic San Francisco Bay Bridge behind him.
However, what is rare is that on the second day, Sun Yuchen issued an apology statement on Weibo. In the full text, Sun Yuchen felt deeply guilty for his excessive marketing and enthusiasm for hype. He also said that Caixin was a prestigious journal that he subscribed to and studied repeatedly during his college years, and Ms. Hu Shuli was also a senior teacher that he respected and admired very much. At the same time, he also expressed his apologies to Wang Xiaochuan and expressed his willingness to actively cooperate with the regulatory authorities in their research and guidance.
It is worth mentioning that "regulatory authorities" appeared 9 times in the apology letter, and so far, Sun Yuchen has not appeared in public in mainland China.
After that, Sun Yuchen, who had been silent for a while, launched the first GameFi project Win NFT Horse in the ecosystem when the GameFi track became popular. In Sun Yuchen's view, GameFI will become the next blockchain explosion point just like DeFi. Win NFT Horse is a GameFI+NFT project jointly launched by TRON, APENFT Foundation and Winklink.
Thanks to Sun Ge's call and influence, horse racing not only added fuel to the GameFI track, but also pushed Win NFT Horse to the top of the popularity of the entire chain game. Players can get NFT token rewards through competitions. Obviously, TRON's goal is to snipe Axie Infinity. WIN tokens have also become the second TRON token listed on Binance after BTT.
However, in less than two months, Win NFT Horse players began to report problems with withdrawals. The official silence soon turned into a barrage of abuse on Twitter.
Soon after, Justin Sun finally responded with a post: The online rumor that horse racing cannot be withdrawn is not true. The real situation is that the horse racing game is particularly popular, and the demand for it has surged. The original system cannot handle such a large number of withdrawal requests. An automatic withdrawal and risk control system has been developed to deal with all backlogs within 48 hours.
It turns out that the withdrawal problem of the horse racing game was eventually solved, but the popularity of the horse racing game has also made many players lose patience after this battle, leading to a sharp decline. As the hottest GamrFi project at the time, the cooling of horse racing even cooled the entire GameFi market to a certain extent, and even the entire market experienced a period of cold winter after the cooling of GameFi.
So far, despite the rapid development of the TRON ecosystem, the project tokens of the TRON ecosystem, JST, BTT, and WIN, have not escaped the fate of plummeting after the popularity.
Sun Yuchen, who has been in the vortex, soon found himself a new identity, Grenada's ambassador to the WTO and ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary. In return, several tokens including TRON created by Sun Yuchen became Grenada's legal digital currency. TRON will also provide blockchain infrastructure for Dominica and is authorized to issue the national token Dominica Coin (DMC).
Although Grenada is one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean, the identity of a permanent ambassador to the WTO can obviously be a powerful shelter when some troubles come to the door.
With an official identity, Sun Yuchen quickly set his sights on exchanges, and Huobi, one of the three major exchanges, was taken into Sun Yuchen's pocket. Soon after, the exchange, renamed Huobi, cooperated with the Dominican government to launch the Dominica digital citizen gameplay. What is more interesting is that mainland citizens can obtain Dominica digital identities and then conduct virtual currency trading activities on platforms such as Huobi, which invisibly circumvents the KYC supervision of exchanges.
Sure enough, Sun Yuchen seemed to have foresight, and trouble soon came to him. First, in a report published by the American technology blog The Verge, The Verge sent a long article to Sun Yuchen, listing multiple "crimes", including suspected fraud, evading ICO (initial coin offering) bans, money laundering, evading the law, and other crimes during his time at the XN currency exchange Poloniex, and claimed that he was being investigated by the FBI and the US Internal Revenue Service also planned to initiate a lawsuit.
At that time, Sun Yuchen sent five tweets in a row to give a tough response. He also stated that as Grenada's ambassador to the World Trade Organization, he has broad diplomatic immunity during his term of office, including affirmative protection in the civil and criminal fields, which means that the FBI or the IRS have no legal recognition for any investigation or prosecution conducted. This status not only grants him a special litigation status, but also becomes the key basis for his rebuttal.
In June 2022, after Grenada's general election, Sun Yuchen was deprived of his ambassadorial status, and the New Kuomintang that granted Sun Yuchen the position was dismissed by the National Democratic Conference. Sun Yuchen also publicly confirmed that he had resigned as Grenada's ambassador to the WTO on March 31, 2023.
According to Coindesk, the SEC announced that it had filed a complaint with the Manhattan District Court in New York against Justin Sun and his three wholly-owned companies, Tron Foundation Limited (Tron), BitTorrent Foundation Ltd. and Rainberry Inc. (formerly BitTorrent), alleging that Justin Sun offered and sold crypto asset securities Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) without registration, and manipulated the secondary market of TRX through a large number of wash trading frauds, involving the simultaneous or almost simultaneous buying and selling of securities, making it appear that trading was active, but the actual beneficial ownership did not actually change.
Tron responded that the civil lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lacked basis. Justin Sun also applied to the court for dismissal, and emphasized that the SEC had no jurisdiction over his Tron Foundation in Singapore, and that BTT on TRX was completely sold overseas, and that relevant measures were taken to avoid the U.S. market. The SEC countered that Sun Yuchen stayed in the United States for more than 380 days from 2017 to 2019. The case has been dismissed by the court, and the judge chose to stand on the side of TRON.
In the SEC's accusation, Sun Yuchen's Bittrex is suspected of money laundering transactions and selling unregistered securities. The SEC's accusation is undoubtedly that Sun Yuchen has touched the bottom line of its supervision. I wonder if the SEC will give up easily? You know, the SEC has almost zero tolerance for Crypto's problems involving the sale of unregistered securities, and the accusation of suspected money laundering transactions is obviously more serious.
Having said that, if faced with the pressure of investigations from China and the United States, nationality and law enforcement boundaries are not shields. Only if there is really no problem can you be safe in the midst of disturbances.
At the moment of the MeMe wave, Sun Yuchen and TRON once again set their sights on the MeMe track. As the MeMe fair launcher of the TRON ecosystem, SunPump announced a series of stimulating subsidies, a 10 million ecological incentive plan, free gas fees and other benefits as soon as it was launched. Sun Yuchen publicly stated in front of the media that the current MeMe Launchpad is a stock game, and the platform must have low launch costs, deep liquidity and flexibility. And hope to inject fresh vitality into the dormant market through SunPump. In the process of promoting the MeMe platform and tokens, Sun Yuchen once again demonstrated his top-level means. Sun Yuchen even changed the avatar of the X account to the image of Black Myth Wukong, and said that he would send everyone a wave of Black Myth Wukong benefits. The related MeMe token Sun WuKong skyrocketed overnight, with the highest increase of 391 times. Soon after SunPump went online, its market value exceeded 1.1 billion US dollars, and its daily active users exceeded 20,000.
Recently, there have been many rumors about Sun Yuchen on the X platform, and discussions about the continuous appearance of black U in stablecoins on TRON. Obviously, Sun Yuchen has been the focus of attention, topics and controversy.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? This is a difficult question that has troubled the FBI for many years. It is also the answer that the crypto community wants to know most. And there is no doubt that Satoshi Nakamoto, known as the father of Bitcoin, is the top cryptography geek regardless of his true identity as an individual or a team.
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and described an electronic currency and algorithm called "Bitcoin". In 2009, the network was officially launched, which opened the long journey of the Crypto era.
After the first Bitcoin client program was released, according to the set algorithm, the computer used large CPU computing power to solve the calculation problem. Anyone who provided computing power in the same block had a chance to obtain Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto was the first person to run the Bitcoin network and also obtained the world's first batch of 50 Bitcoins.
Satoshi Nakamoto's idea was to create a decentralized payment system. Without the transaction friction and control of centralized institutions, end-to-end transactions were more direct. This emerging concept quickly became popular among programmers. What made Bitcoin break the circle the most was the famous Bitcoin Pizza Day - a programmer used 10,000 Bitcoins to buy two pizzas, marking the recognition of Bitcoin's transaction value. And with WikiLeaks' application of Bitcoin in transactions, the concept of Bitcoin began to spread beyond the circle and gradually became known to more people.
Since the end of 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto has disappeared from the Internet. Apart from his earliest claim on the Internet that he was a 37-year-old man living in Japan, there has been no definite news about him - and the content he promoted himself is generally considered to be fake news. He has never spoken Japanese online, and his English level is more like a native speaker. After the price of Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $73,000 this year, it created a miracle in human history regarding finance and cryptography. It is also a digital currency revolution that provides society with a new way to transmit and store value. The highest market value of Bitcoin has also surpassed silver, becoming the eighth largest asset in the world by market value. Considering asset security and national information security, who exactly is Satoshi Nakamoto, who has millions of Bitcoins in his account, is also the goal that the FBI has been tirelessly pursuing - after the Bitcoin ETF was passed, hedge funds, pension funds and banks began to invest heavily in Bitcoin spot ETFs, and traditional investors also began to accept this asset class. As of August 15, 701 new funds have reported to the SEC that they hold Bitcoin spot ETFs, and the total number of holdings has approached 1,950.
Although there have been people who have come out to admit that they are Satoshi Nakamoto over the years, they have not been able to prove themselves in the end. The FBI once said that Satoshi Nakamoto may be "one or more third-party individuals" and neither admitted nor denied that they had information related to Satoshi Nakamoto.
Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, known as "Australian Satoshi", has long insisted that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, but later a British judge ruled that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto or the author of the Bitcoin white paper. After experiencing multiple police raids, investigations and asset freezes. Australian Satoshi also officially stated on his personal website that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto.
Musk once tweeted that the name Nakamoto Satoshi comes from the combination of Nakamichi, Motorola, SAmsung, and TOSHIba.
The general consensus in the cryptographic circle is that this is a cypherpunk with decentralized ideals and anarchism. Unless he is caught by the FBI, he will probably never show up. After all, without a firm belief, it is impossible to create this rare cryptographic miracle in human history, or if there is a little selfishness, it is difficult to remain unmoved for so many years in the face of such a wealth explosion.
As of 18:00 on September 9th, Beijing time, the price of Bitcoin was $55,130, which is more fantastic than the story of the tulip scam that people talk about, but it is a real business story.
There is always the craziest focus in every financial market. This year, the focus of Crypto must be MeMe coin. Looking at the Crypto industry, the most successful MeMe is Musk's Dogecoin. But looking back at the history of Dogecoin, it is full of absurdity and ridicule.
When Bitcoin began to show its edge and the price was getting higher and higher - the friction of Bitcoin transactions at that time was huge and it was not suitable for small payments at all.
Dogecoin is a digital currency created by programmer Billy Marcus in 2013. He and a friend, researcher Jackson Palmer, thought about and created a small digital Huobi similar to tip payment. The reason why it is called Dogecoin is because it uses the Shiba Inu emoticon package of the Internet emoticon package that is popular all over the world - Doge meme. Jackson Palmer, who was working at Adobe at the time, said on Twitter that he was "investing in Dogecoin and firmly believed that it would be the next hit." Interestingly, the origin of Dogecoin was indeed an imitation and mockery of Bitcoin. Under the news of Bitcoin's rapid growth, this most popular emoticon package on the Internet at the time would appear, representing the poster's disdain and mockery of Bitcoin. Marcus also admitted that he wanted to use this method to express his contempt for the high speculative atmosphere in the currency circle. However, because of its interesting pattern and unorthodox issuance method, the issuance volume in the first year was 100 billion, and 5 billion was issued each year thereafter, with no upper limit, and it would expand forever. After its release, it quickly gained the love of the community. This project, which is not very technical but has a strong communication power, soon became a dark horse in the market. As a result, Billy Markus has emerged in the digital currency community and is known as the "Father of Dogecoin".
Dogecoin's technology is based on Litecoin and improved with reference to Bitcoin's code. It uses different hash algorithms (Scrypt) and faster block generation time to increase transaction speed. The generation time of each Dogecoin block is set to 1 minute, which is significantly higher than Bitcoin's 10 minutes.
Of course, Billy Markus certainly did not expect that this kind of network meme culture and community communication, without much ridicule of the underlying technology, has created a future market mainstream track for Crypto. And this communication path rooted in the community has become the core logic of the development of future blockchain projects.
After Dogecoin went online, it set off the community Reddit and Twitter. In less than two weeks, people spontaneously created blogs and forums for Dogecoin, and the number of followers quickly exceeded 1 million. In everyone's eyes, Dogecoin is a fun and cool thing.
But after the initial popularity, Dogecoin was not very successful, at least there was no future possibility at that time, and the two founders obviously did not have much patience and expectations for Dogecoin. The two sold their Dogecoins in 2015 and withdrew from the Dogecoin community. Even they have little intersection with Crypto. After selling all his positions, Marcus bought a second-hand Civic. This is his biggest profit from the Dogecoin project.
After they withdrew, Musk's entry pushed the Dogecoin carnival to a climax, and made Dogecoin become the top ten tokens in the currency circle and the largest MeMecoin overnight. Everyone is familiar with the story behind. The effect of Dogecoin has promoted the prevalence of many MeMe cultures such as SHIB and PEPE, and has also become the most mainstream cultural symbol in American society. But since then, the two founders of Dogecoin have never contributed to the construction of Dogecoin.
The recent progress of the Ethereum Foundation is not very good. On the one hand, with the birth of high-performance public chains, the ecological availability of Ethereum has been diverted. On the other hand, the Ethereum Foundation has been too large to expand the second-layer development, which has seriously dragged down the economic form. As the foundation sells a large number of tokens, the value of Ethereum and Bitcoin has decoupled, causing the ETH market to be sluggish. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also been accused by the community of selling coins, falling in love and enjoying life.
V God recently responded to speculation that he sold millions of dollars of ETH assets for profit. He said that the sale of his ETH holdings was only to support various Crypto asset projects and charity projects.
On-chain analysis company Lookonchain revealed that Buterin transferred 800 ETH to a multi-signature wallet. The recipient then exchanged 190 ETH for 477,000 USDC. Lookonchain also reported that the founder of Ethereum transferred 3,000 ETH to the same multi-signature address on August 9. These transfers have caused speculation that Vitalik Buterin is selling tokens to fall in love, but this kind of community jokes and suspicion can be said to be a happy distress, after all, Ethereum is still vibrant. However, what is most troubling for Vitalik Buterin at the moment is the dispute between L1 and L2, how to solve the long-standing problem of expanding L1, and the current situation of ETH prices that is not optimistic. Relatively speaking, Ripple's recent situation is also relatively good. This XRP century lawsuit finally won recently.
The SEC sued Ripple, accusing it of selling XRP through exchanges involving illegal securities issuance. This century-long lawsuit was once considered a bellwether for regulation, which triggered a dispute over whether cryptocurrencies are securities. Its outcome will directly determine where the boundaries of the final development of the Crypto world are. In fact, before suing XRP, the US SEC also investigated BTC and ETH, which were then known as the three giants of blockchain cryptocurrencies, but ultimately determined that BTC and ETH were not securities.
Until July 13, 2023, District Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York ruled that Ripple's programmatic blind sale of XRP through exchanges did not meet the definition of investment contracts in the securities law and was not considered a security. Although there are still some regulatory uncertainties, the ruling sets a strong precedent and allows the future development of companies like XRP to see a clearer legal path and structure.
Solana, another company in the top 10 by market value, represents a typical story of the strong rise of Wall Street. At Solna's peak, the market value of its token SOL exceeded 540 billion yuan, second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, in the FTX black swan incident, SOL once shrunk by 97%, and liquidity dried up. But as the black swan incident dissipated, Solana's core team has the background of high-tech companies such as Qualcomm and Google, and the capital behind it represents the will of Wall Street. A public chain with high-quality underlying code, large financial support, and native to the United States has successfully reborn. Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes, not to mention in the capital Shura field such as the currency circle, where talented geniuses bloom and then pass by like meteors, there will be countless geniuses rising and blooming here. There is only one thing that is eternal and unchanging, that is, human desires are always difficult to fill, and wonderful stories will always be staged here.
Musk posted a photo of his face placed in China's first AAA blockbuster "Black Myth: Wukong" and hinted that it sounded familiar.
WenJunDaniel Wu, CEO of Game Science and the investor behind “Black Myth: Wukong,” is skeptical about Web3 games, arguing that true passion for game development is essential for success. He emphasises focusing on creating high-quality content efficiently, rather than chasing new technologies like Web3.
WeatherlyDaniel: I have seen a lot of game industry entrepreneurs working on Web3 after Web3 came out. I would never invest in those people. First of all, they don’t love games, so how can they make good games? I think it’s always games plus other things.
JinseFinanceCurrently, GameFi is stuck in the quagmire of over-financialization and complex economic models, ignoring the fact that the core of the game is to attract and retain player experience.
JinseFinanceSun Yuchen successfully pushed the "Sun Wukong" virtual currency up 391 times by using marketing methods such as changing avatars and redeeming game codes, and all of this was closely related to the popularity of "Black Myth: Wukong".
Miyuki"Black Myth: Wukong" became a top-tier game overnight, topping the Steam online rankings on the first day of its release, setting a record for the number of online users for a stand-alone game.
JinseFinanceYesterday, many crypto industry bigwigs and platform organizations took out a lot of "Black Myth: Wukong" activation codes to carry out activities. Overnight, the entire industry was "empty streets" full of people playing and swiping the screen.
JinseFinance"Black Myth: Wukong" set a new record for Chinese games on its first day of release. Both sales and player feedback performed well. Justin Sun's $SunWukong soared 400 times.
ZeZhengBlack Myth: Wukong set a new record on Steam, received rave reviews, and attracted great interest. However, map design issues and different opinions on Taiwan's game development capabilities still exist. The price of the related meme coin $Wukong has risen sharply.
ZeZheng"Black Myth: Wukong" is making waves with its record-breaking download figures and cultural impact. As the game garners attention both in gaming and financial circles, it will be interesting to see how it influences future trends and discussions.
ZeZheng