After the ETH Shanghai upgrade, a total of 437,800 ETH has been withdrawn, 223,400 have been deposited, and 1.38 million are waiting for withdrawal. This week, Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, ETH pledge unlocking, US CPI dropped to 5.0% unexpectedly (previous value 6.0%), at least 4 members of the Federal Reserve mentioned "pausing interest rate hikes", the US dollar index has fallen for 5 consecutive weeks, and gold is close to a record high , the bottom of the pie doubled to $31,000, and ETH stood at $2,100. At the end of the interest rate hike, is the cycle building?

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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is preparing to shift to DeFi regulation as it reopens with proposed regulations. If approved, the updated proposal would use clearer language to include DeFi in the expanded definition of regulated exchanges and would detail its estimate of how much the change is expected to cost the industry. The UK's newly established Department of Science, Innovation and Technology will promote the country's Metaverse and Web3 strategies. The Z government hopes to lead the future of network technology, and the new technology department established in February will lead this work. Musk is making plans to launch a new artificial intelligence startup, X.AI, to compete with ChatGPT maker OpenAl. Hong Kong Deputy Secretary for Justice Zhang Guojun announced the launch of the Hong Kong Web3Hub Ecological Fund with a scale of US$10 million, which will encourage more companies to settle in Hong Kong. Looking into the future, Hong Kong must better develop its unique advantages.

Skyland Ventures, a Japanese venture capital firm, announced that it has raised $38 million for its Web3 Fund, with SBI Group participating in the investment. O-K will start the sale of SUI new coins on April 23, 2023. The event will adopt the "subscription + lottery" method to sell SUI at a price of $0.1, and the payment currency is OKB. BitPay, a cryptocurrency payment service provider, announced that users can now buy ETH through Apple Pay. Onramp, a Bitcoin financial services company, launched a spot Bitcoin trust for high-net-worth investors, with each unit of the trust equivalent to one Bitcoin. According to L2BEAT data, the total locked amount of Ethereum L2 reached $10.51 billion, with a 7-day increase of 14.92%. The top five are: Arbitrum One $7.03 billion, Optimism $2.14 billion, dYdx $372 million, ZkSyncEra $242 million, and Immutable x $144 million. The Arbitrum community proposed a proposal to "return the remaining 700 million ARB of the foundation to the DAO", with 84.01% of the votes against it. It is reported that it was not passed. The proposal aims to return the $700 million ARB that was unfairly allocated to the foundation by the DAO.

Hong Kong New World Group will host the 2023 New World Innovation Challenge, which includes a Web3 project competition co-organized with Newman Capital. Web3 startups can sign up to participate. At the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Yan Ying, technical director of Ant Chain, a blockchain brand under Ant Group: Share the new progress of Web3 security technology on site, including the accumulation of Ant Chain in Web3 identity security, application security and Layer2 security. JPMorgan Chase: Bitcoin and gold are rising at the same time, and both are seen as hedges against catastrophic scenarios. The most important support for Bitcoin comes from investors' attention to next year's halving event, which is scheduled to take place in April 2024, when mining rewards will be halved. MacroMicro: China's credit impulse index rebounded from 24% to 26% this year, indicating that credit expansion has resumed relative to the growth rate. The Federal Reserve published a paper in November saying that the continued rise in China's credit impulse may promote the global financial cycle. Bitcoin, as a risky asset, tends to move more or less in line with stock trends. In addition, previous instances of credit expansion in China coincided with major trend changes in Bitcoin from a bear market to a bull market. Therefore, a continued rise in the Credit Impulse Index could bode well for Bitcoin.

This week, the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival mentioned many policies and financial support for crypto assets/crypto companies/projects, which were full of sincerity. On the Fed side, voting member Goolsbee first hinted that "it might be appropriate to pause rate hikes", and then many Fed members expressed their views on pausing rate hikes. Voting member Harker said "we must be careful to avoid overaction", and Daly said that without further policy actions, the economy may slow down enough to achieve this goal. Bostic said more bluntly: After another rate hike, the Fed can pause rate hikes and evaluate to avoid unnecessary economic damage.

Policies in the East and the West are favorable for building a foundation. In the East, the Hong Kong Web3Hub Fund will launch a $100 million Web3 ecological fund to support the virtual asset industry chain. In the past two months, 350 Web3 companies have registered in Hong Kong, and there are already 100 strategic partners. In the West, the minutes of the Federal Reserve meeting mentioned that the economy will experience a mild recession later this year, policymakers have lowered their expectations for interest rate hikes this year, and considered whether to suspend interest rate hikes in March. The Federal Reserve will gradually transition from focusing on inflation to focusing on the economy.

The negatives will become smaller and smaller, because you can already see the end of the Fed's fiscal tightening, and the positives will become larger and larger, gradually transitioning to a pause/rate cut. It is not an accident or luck, but just following the mainstream assets, and it has come to this step routinely (or cyclically). Look at gold. With the stimulus of stopping interest rate hikes, it has reached $2,000, close to the historical high in 2020. Institutions predict that the gold price will be $2,400 in a year (rate cut effect). BTC is also playing a hedging role for the Fed, and it has always been the largest. #BTC #crypto2023 #ETH #Binance #Web3