Summary of outstanding events in the first quarter of 2024

The first 3 months of 2024 ended with many positive signs. The SEC's approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF became the "detonator" that brought crypto out of the long winter, pushing the market to accelerate upward. Along with that is the recovery of most segments in the market, crypto projects seem to "come back to life", issuing tokens, launching their own chains, updating roadmaps,... All bring a feeling of The "long night" of 2022-2023 has ended, we are entering a new phase of growth.

Summary of outstanding events in the first quarter of 2024

January

SEC approves 11 Bitcoin spot ETF proposals

On January 11, 2024, the US Securities Commission (SEC) officially approved the launch of 11 Bitcoin spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) of Wall Street giants, including Ark Invest, BlackRock , Bitwise, VanEck, WisdomTree, Invesco & Galaxy, Fidelity and Valkyrie.
The SEC had to give the "green light" because the agency had almost no reason to continue to reject it, especially after Grayscale prevailed before the SEC in the August 2023 trial.

In the official announcement, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler stated that despite the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF, the securities commission still maintains a neutral attitude and does not directly support cryptocurrencies. Additionally, the only crypto asset allowed to create an ETF is Bitcoin, the SEC still believes that many cryptocurrencies are securities.

But despite the SEC's "hawkish" attitude, once ETF spot is opened for trading on stock exchanges, cash flow from traditional investors begins to pour into the market, creating a premise to trigger a new uptrend season. .

Notably, before the official announcement, a "half funny" story happened: the SEC hacked account X (Twitter), posting a notice approving a fake Bitcoin ETF.
Manta Network TGE and MANTA token airdrop

On January 18, 2024, Manta Network TGE and listed many major exchanges simultaneously. Along with the huge airdrop for the community, Manta became an impressive highlight in the "airdrop hunt" in the first month of 2024.
Despite many controversies on the first day of its launch, it cannot be denied that MANTA has achieved certain successes. Currently, this is Layer-2 ranked 6th in terms of token value locked (TVL), with 1.55 billion USD according to data from L2Beat.

February

Genesis paid a fine of 21 million USD, closing the lawsuit with the SEC
Genesis filed for bankruptcy in January 2023, due to being heavily implicated in the collapse of cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and the FTX crisis scandal. At the same time, the SEC sued Gemini and Genesis for illegally offering and selling securities to retail investors, through the Gemini Earn crypto lending program.
After 1 year of pursuing the lawsuit, on February 2 Genesis agreed to pay a fine of 21 million USD to settle with the SEC.

In addition, Genesis also had its license to operate in the state revoked by the New York Financial Services Agency, and was fined $8 million for violating virtual currency and cybersecurity regulations.

In another development, the ambiguous relationship between parent company DCG and Genesis continues to frustrate the community. DCG recently announced that it had paid off short-term debt for Genesis, but was immediately accused of distorting the truth.

The creditor submitted an application to the court asserting that Digital Currency Group still owes Genesis a large amount of money in the form of BTC and USD, as well as 26 million USD in interest for delayed debt payments, but has not "paid off" anything. chief.

Binance adjusts listing mechanism after RON "insider trading" scandal
On the evening of February 5, after Ronin Network's RONIN coin was listed on Binance, there were countless discussions surrounding the continuous decrease in price of the coin, especially suspicions of insider trading from prior knowledge. listing time.

Previously, right after Binance announced the listing, an account was said to have sold off 1 million USD of RONIN on OKX, causing the coin price to fall from about 3.5 USD to 2.7 USD.

Binance co-founder Yi He said on the evening of February 5 that she had conducted an investigation and confirmed that there had been insider trading on the part of Ronin Network.

The female general also set more stringent adjustments, that if information was leaked to the outside, the listing of that coin would also be canceled by the exchange.
FTX abandoned its revival plan and focused on paying off debt
FTX's lawyer said the exchange has abandoned its plan to revive the trading platform.
Instead, the exchange will focus on liquidating all existing assets to fully refund customers - who are victims of the crash at the end of 2022.

Up to now, FTX has sold 2/3 of the shares in the "unicorn" AI company Anthropic, earning 884 million USD.

Starknet and the controversial STRK token airdrop

On February 14, the Starknet Foundation provided detailed information about the timing of the airdrop event of STRK, the private token of the layer-2 Starknet network.

Accordingly, 700 million STRK tokens will be awarded to early users and members who have contributed to the development of the project. The airdrop date is February 20, 2024.

However, many crypto users, after learning that they did not meet the conditions to receive the airdrop, turned to criticize Starknet for setting too high standards, as well as "excessively" favoring the programmers instead of the developers. Early users spent hundreds of dollars but received nothing in return, while developers only needed to make small contributions such as fixing spelling errors to receive an airdrop.

The conflict intensified when someone pointed out STRK's token unlocking schedule. Accordingly, on April 15, 2024, just 2 months after the airdrop, Starknet will release up to 13% of the total token supply to the development team and investors, meaning that the circulating token supply will increase. then it will increase 3 times.

Although CEO StarkWare himself spoke up to affirm the project's stance, determined not to be swayed by community opinion, in the end the unlock schedule had to be adjusted. According to the new schedule, only 0.64% of the total token supply (64 million STRK) will be unlocked on April 15.
However, giving too much favor to developers has resulted in users "spamming" GitHub airdrop hoses, while this is inherently a platform for programmers to update and truly contribute.
The explosion of the points reward model

Rewards “points” are a trend that has emerged in the crypto space in recent months, used by projects to attract users, speculators and airdrop hunters. Some people call this a new way to make an impression in the eyes of the community, but there are also opinions that it is just a temporary fad and is being overly exploited.
Points are reward points awarded to users by the project after completing specific tasks, such as providing liquidity and swapping tokens. However, this is just an individual form of scoring and is not recorded on the blockchain. Having bonus points is a "hint" that the project may conduct an airdrop without having to make an official confirmation, thereby attracting new users.
Some even joke that the nature of the points reward model is not that early users farm airdrops, but are actually being farmed in reverse by projects.

But despite criticism, more and more projects are using this reward model, starting with friend.tech and then Blast, MarginFi, Rainbow Wallet, Rabby Wallet, Scallop, Fraxtal, Azuki, Magic Eden , Orbiter Finance, EigenLayer, Backpack,...

Worldcoin (WLD) leads the AI surge
In the early morning of February 16, the artificial intelligence company behind the ChatGPT chatbot that once caused a stir in the world's technology world, OpenAI, announced its latest product. Named Sora, this is an AI model that creates high-quality videos and realistic images with just text descriptions.

The world technology community is excited, which is also the time when Worldcoin, another project of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leads the growth momentum.

Next is the NVIDIA GTC AI 2024 event, adding "fuel" to narrative AI tokens such as WLD, FET, RNDR, GRT, NEAR,...

But Worldcoin still faces legal difficulties from Hong Kong and Spain.

Uniswap shares fees with users, other DEXs follow suit

On the evening of February 23, 2024, the Uniswap Foundation suddenly announced its latest governance proposal related to the protocol's fee mechanism. Accordingly, Uniswap can reward those who have delegated or staked their UNI.

UNI price also had the advantage of increasing by nearly 80%. By March 7, the proposal was approved with 100% votes, showing support from the user community.
Other DeFi protocols also followed Uniswap's lead, announcing new token models for their projects, such as Frax Finance.

Gemini paid a fine of 37 million USD
Perhaps following the example of its "star fruit brother" Genesis, Gemini also agreed to pay a fine of 37 million USD to close the lawsuit with the New York regulatory agency.

At the same time, the exchange will refund a minimum of 1.1 billion USD to Gemini Earn program customers. The deal is seen as a win for Earn customers, who have entrusted their assets to Gemini.

March

Bitcoin sets ATH at 73,000 USD thanks to Bitcoin spot ETF inflow

After only 2 months of ETF spot being approved, large cash flows from traditional organizations seemed to be "opened", pouring massively into the crypto market. Despite the conversion pressure from Grayscale's GBTC, the buying force from the remaining 11 ETFs is enough to "support" the increase of the whole market.
BTC price climbs day by day, peaks are set and then broken. By March 13, 2024, BTC set a new ATH at 73,000 USD, also marking a record inflow into ETF spot of up to 1 billion USD.

Ethereum successfully deployed Dencun upgrade

After many implementations of Dencun, it was not too smooth when Ethereum developers repeatedly tested the upgrade unsuccessfully, leading to continuously changing the original roadmap from 2023 to the end of February 2024.

Finally, at 20:55 PM on March 13, 2024 (Vietnam time), the Dencun upgrade - a combination of Deneb (updated in Consensus) and Cancun (updated in Execution) on the Ethereum network - was completed. Officially activated and deployed at epoch 269568, according to the scheduled schedule.

Dencun opens up many possibilities for DeFi, Gaming, metaverse... especially the Liquid Restaking (LRT) segment - a smart contract that allows ETH staking participants to reuse locked ETH to increase the safety of transactions. other consciousness.

This is the segment that is expected to become the focus of the post-Dencun market.

The most obvious benefit is that gas fees on many layer-2 layers of Ethereum are reduced tenfold.
The return of Solana and the explosion of the SOL memecoin

Solana (SOL) is the most "energetic" coin in the current growth season, sometimes rising beyond the 200 USD price mark and "surpassing" BNB to become the 4th most valuable coin on the market.
The whole Solana network seems to be "proliferating" again. DEX Jupiter with the largest airdrop ever on Solana, or Bonk airdrop for Saga phone owners, then WEN airdrop.

It is impossible not to mention the explosion of Solana memecoins with many types such as memes "parodying" celebrities, dog memes like dogwifhat (WIF) respectively setting ATH after promoting many attention-grabbing activities such as called for $650,000 to put the logo on the "Vegas sphere".
WIF is so powerful that it has surpassed PEPE in terms of capitalization, and in turn set an ATH after listing Binance.

Thanks to memecoin, Solana even surpasses Ethereum in transaction volume on DEX.

Binance is in legal trouble with the Nigerian government

Tensions between Binance and the Nigerian government peaked when Nigeria detained two Binance employees on the last day of February. A day later, the community was shocked with news that Nigeria accused Binance of "indirectly" causing damage. national loss, demanding compensation of 10 billion USD.

But the host country's government has issued a correction and has not confirmed the above figure.

Binance then stopped supporting all services in Nigeria, and delisted all trading pairs related to the local currency naira. However, the court continued to apply pressure, requiring Binance to provide all Nigerian user transaction data.

And today, Binance was officially charged with tax evasion, including "failure to pay value added tax (VAT), corporate income tax, failure to declare taxes and complicity in assisting customers to evade taxes through the foundation of the floor".

2 Binance employees were arrested, 1 is believed to have escaped, the other has just filed a lawsuit against the Nigerian government, demanding a public apology.

The first quarter also witnessed Binance's legal troubles with many governments around the world, not just Nigeria. SEC Philippines officially blocks access to Binance. CommEX, Binance's questionable exchange in Russia, also announced the suspension of operations.

Ethereum Foundation falls under legal scrutiny, Ethereum spot ETF is unlikely to be approved

On March 20, the community spread news that the Ethereum Foundation was asked by an anonymous government to cooperate in the investigation, which the owner also confirmed.
According to sources from a lawyer involved in the case, the Ethereum Foundation may be working with the SEC through the Swiss government, where the organization is registered.

Specifically, the SEC is said to be reviewing ETF proposals for Ether, launching a campaign to classify Ethereum as a security.

Therefore, analysts are not very optimistic about the possibility of these proposals being approved by officials by the deadline next May.

The US accused KuCoin of laundering $9 billion in dirty money
On March 26, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced an indictment against the global cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin, and two of the platform's founders, Chun Gan (Michael) and Ke Tang (Eric).

Accordingly, KuCoin was charged with being an illegal money transmitter and materially violating the Bank Secrecy Act. The other two figures were behind directing this organization to avoid anti-money laundering and terrorist financing programs, not maintaining customer identity verification (KYC) procedures or submitting any activity reports, and abetted $9 billion in illegal activities since 2017.

KCS price immediately dumped heavily, along with more than 1 billion USD withdrawn from KuCoin. The exchange quickly reassured users and promised to airdrop 10 million USD of KCS tokens and BTC for users who had to wait for withdrawals in the past two days.

Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison

As reported by Coin68, after a trial of more than a month at the end of last year, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the person behind the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange in November 2022, was convicted. found guilty on all 7 charges.
Finally, at the sentencing hearing on March 28, SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame - four other individuals associated with FTX and Alameda Research charged in the same case as SBF - pleaded guilty and accepted the deals.

This seems to put an end to the shocking scandal about FTX and SBF that has wasted a lot of ink in the world media over the past 2 years.

But the crypto community still believes that 25 years in prison is too lenient a sentence for this controversial figure.