Justin Sun Invests in Lido Finance

The Lookonchain Twitter account, which tracks blockchain transactions, revealed that crypto billionaire and founder of the Tron blockchain ecosystem, Justin Sun, has invested 150,100 ETH totaling around $240 million in liquid DeFi staking project Lido Finance. It is known that this is not Sun's first investment in Lido Finance, as multi-chain tracker DeBank reports that the total amount invested by the crypto billionaire in Lido Finance to date is 200,164.03 ETH, which is equivalent to approximately $327 million at the current rate. The Tron founder’s investment naturally stimulated the hype around Lido Finance’s native token, LDO, causing its price on centralized trading platforms to rise by more than 3% over the past 24 hours. At the time of writing, it is trading at $3.10. However, over the past 24 hours, its value reached a weekly low at $3.27 with a weekly growth rate of 7.5%. The founders of Lido Finance reported that they have successfully activated a security protocol feature called the Staking Rate Limit in response to newly staked ETH, which the project says has set a daily inflow record. The developers specify that the feature of the Staking Rate Limit is that it is, in fact, a dynamic mechanism for responding to large inflows of rates and eliminating possible side effects. Thus, the system eliminates the dilution of rewards without the need to explicitly suspend stake deposits.

 

 

Patrick Hillman Denies Forbes Accusations of Binance Fraud

According to Forbes, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, between August 17 and early December 2022, Binance “silently” moved $1.8 billion deposited “as collateral intended to support its customers’ stablecoins,” leaving many of its users without security. However, Binance's head of security, Patrick Hillman, later explained that the movement of capital between wallets was in accordance with the company's charter and that the exchange does not mix its assets with client funds. He also invited stakeholders to verify the validity of their claims in public blockchain records: “While Binance has previously acknowledged that wallet management processes for Binance-pegged token collateral have not always been flawless, at no time was the collateralization of user assets affected. Processes for managing our collateral wallets have been fixed on a longer-term basis and this is verifiable on-chain.” At the same time, Forbes authors claim that at least $ 1.1 billion of the funds received from customers in USDC tokens, a stablecoin from Circle, were sent to the wallets of the Chicago-based high-frequency trading firm Cumberland / DWR. According to reporters, the company may have been assisting Binance in its efforts to convert these assets into its own Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoin. In the investigation, the journalists also say that “Binance’s Asset Shuffling Eerily Similar To Maneuvers By FTX.”

 

Neal Stephenson Doubts the Imminent Popularity of Metaverses

In an interview with the Financial Times, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who first coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, stated that the growth of the metaverse will depend on the quality of the experience offered in the virtual world. Therefore, it is too early to talk about the mass introduction of technology: “There won’t be a metaverse that is used by millions of people until it contains experiences that millions of people find worth having, and making those experiences is quite difficult.” The author, who established a clear relationship between the metaverse and gaming technologies, also spoke about the fact that the games industry is an economic and technological engine that will obviously become the basis of any future metaverse. He also cited Doom, created by John Carmack of ID Software, as one of the games that started the metaverse era. But Stevenson also singled out a special role for blockchain metaverses. In his opinion, the internal design of each metaverse can be done centrally. But moving data between two gaming metaverses will always imply a larger, shared metaverse that will be built on top of the blockchain and driven by its toolkit.