Our weekly roundup of news from East Asia curates the industry’s most important developments. Hong Kong’s new Bitcoin and Ether ETFs Hong Kong’s Securities & Futures Commission has approved spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs. But will they unlock a river of gold from Asian investors, or will they simply be a blip on the radar of the finance world? Social media pricked up its ears at the news that Hong Kong offshoots of Chinese asset managers Harvest Fund Management, Bosera Asset Management, and China Asset Management (ChinaAMC) are among the first to kickstart their crypto asset ETFs.  Boser ..read more

Everything you need to know about the AI future that’s hurtling fast towards us. Jump to: Video of the week — Atlas Robot, Everybody hates Humane’s AI pin, AI makes holocaust victims immortal, Knowledge collapse from mid-curve AIs, Users should beg to pay for AI, Can non-coders create a program with AI? All Killer, No Filler AI News. Predicting the future with the past There’s a new prompting technique to get ChatGPT to do what it hates doing the most — predict the future. New research suggests the best way to get accurate predictions from ChatGPT is to prompt it to tell a story set in the fut ..read more

Bitcoin halving twice as good for Web3 Games this time around Joonmo Kwon, founder and CEO of Web3 gaming platform Delabs Games, predicts that this week’s Bitcoin halving will see funds pouring into the Web3 gaming industry. “The heightened market enthusiasm and increased capital inflows into the cryptocurrency space resulting from the halving event could translate into more significant funding and advancement for Web3 gaming initiatives,” Kwon tells Web3 Gamer. “As altcoin market dominance and market capitalization climb, there is typically an increased interest and influx of capital into gam ..read more

You may have heard of Joseph Lubin, the Ethereum co-founder presently serving as the CEO of Consensys. But don’t confuse him for Kieren James-Lubin — the entrepreneur’s highly successful son who co-founded his own company, BlockApps, in 2015. James-Lubin now serves as the chief executive of BlockApps from its offices in Miami Beach — where he moved from New York City after a stint at the University of California-Berkeley, where he had been working on a PhD in theoretical physics. We took a few minutes to speak with him about his thoughts on the future of the cryptocurrency industry. Here’s wha ..read more

Ethena Labs’ new stablecoin topped $2 billion in market cap faster than any other dollar-pegged asset in crypto’s history. But USDe’s meteoric rise has sparked fears that it might repeat the high-profile collapses of other stablecoins. While its attractive yield of 17.2% has drawn frequent comparisons to Terraform Labs’ disastrous stablecoin UST, it’s really nothing like UST, which had the circular backing of its own token, an algorithm, and a few hopes and prayers.  Ethena distances itself from such predecessors by marketing its stablecoin as a “synthetic dollar.” To mint the USDe synthe ..read more

Top Stories This Week SEC issues Wells notice to DeFi protocol Uniswap The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a Wells notice to decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap on April 10. A Wells notice is a formal indication from the SEC that it plans to recommend enforcement action. The SEC has been investigating Uniswap Labs, the main developer behind Uniswap, since 2021. In response to increasing regulatory scrutiny, the platform has previously removed several tokens from its listing. The DEX’s native token, Uniswap (UNI), fell 10% in the hours following the news, reaching a six-we ..read more

Be quick: Ghostface Killah drops free-to-mint music-infused Ordinals NakaPepes has tuned in with Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, Rare Scrilla and Ordinals Bot to airdrop 10,000 music-infused Bitcoin Ordinals on April 11 (about an hour after this story is published). NakaPepes’ North American-based team, Teddy Bitcoins, Jimmy Toussaint and Mumbling Bearded Freak, are the lead creators and executive directors behind the famous rapper inscribing his latest tracks on the Bitcoin network. “We have always tried to pay homage to Bitcoin history and culture in our collections. What better way to comb ..read more

Synthetix founder Kain Warwick awoke one morning in May last year with a realization: “Something’s wrong here. We’re approaching this in the wrong way.” After launching Synthetix Perps v2 in late 2022, Synthetix founder Kain Warwick expected the new decentralized perpetual futures exchange would take a massive bite out of the Binance-dominated derivatives market. Six months later, Warwick woke up one morning to the realization that wasn’t going to happen for two reasons: 1) Most traders still don’t want to use DeFi, and 2) The “build it, they will come” mantra is stupid. “If you’re doing somet ..read more

Popular crypto trader and YouTuber Brian Jung says he’s been turning down offers from crypto companies wanting to partner up ever since he was caught with his pants down when FTX collapsed. He admits it was one of the “lowest moments” of his career. “I’ve actually turned down more than seven figures in sponsorship deals and even things like KOL [key opinion leader] partnerships that a lot of influencers do,” Jung tells Hall of Flame. “Since FTX, we’ve learned our lesson and we’re very careful when working with any company,” he adds. Jung even said no to crypto exchange Coinbase, which he recko ..read more

Ever since the Dencun upgrade that dramatically lowered fees on Ethereum layer 2s, Coinbase’s not-very-decentralized rollup Base has surged in user numbers, transactions and total value locked. As with the fast and cheap L1 blockchain Solana, most of the activity is being fuelled by degenerate gambling on memecoins, with hopefuls vying to make life-changing amounts of money from a small outlay. But an investigation by Magazine has found the vast majority of memecoins on the platform have security vulnerabilities that could expose users to big losses. And almost one in five are deliberately ma ..read more