- The new policy from PayPal will remove buyer and seller protection for NFT transactions.
- The U.S. SEC will decide whether to approve the Ethereum spot ETF applications submitted by VanEck and ArkInvest/21 Shares.
- The launch of the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI) is scheduled for May 24th.
- Dragon8 hard fork will be implemented on Chiliz Chain, with the CHZ annual inflation rate decreasing gradually from 8.8%.
- Approximately $8.12 billion worth of PYTH will unlock on May 20th.
Key Events
Effective May 20th, PayPal’s new policy will remove buyer and seller protection for NFT transactions. NFT purchases will no longer be covered by the company’s buyer protection plan. Additionally, NFT sales over $10,000 will not be protected against false claims and refunds.
Elon Musk has requested Helen Toner, a former board member of OpenAI, to submit records related to the decision to remove Sam Altman and reinstate him by May 21st. This request is related to Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman filed last month, alleging that the company violated its initial commitments made when establishing a multi-billion-dollar partnership with its largest investor, Microsoft.
The first bankruptcy hearing for cryptocurrency lending company Delio has been postponed to May 21st. The South Korean Financial Services Commission (FSC) Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) announced sanctions against the crypto finance company Delio in September last year, including a three-month suspension of all operations, a fine of 1.896 billion Korean won (approximately $1.44 million), and the dismissal of a senior executive.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Terraform Labs, along with lawyer Do Kwon, will engage in court debates on May 22nd regarding the compensation plan for a fraud case. The SEC is seeking approximately $4.7 billion in disgorgement and prejudgment interest, as well as a total of $520 million in civil penalties from Kwon and Terraform. Terraform’s legal team is proposing a $1 million civil penalty, with no disgorgement.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will decide on VanEck’s Ethereum spot ETF application on May 23rd and ArkInvest/21 Shares’ submission on May 24th. However, market sentiment suggests that the SEC is unlikely to approve both Ethereum spot ETF applications. Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute, stated that the market currently perceives the chances of these ETFs being approved before the end of May at only 16%. Nate Geraci, President of ETF Store, indicated that the SEC might approve the Ethereum spot ETF 19b-4 (exchange rule change) filings first, then slow down the approval process for S-1 (registration statement).
ASI, formed by the merger of Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Ocean Protocol, is set to launch on May 24th. The merger of the three entities was approved by their respective communities through proposal voting, and their tokens were exchanged for ASI tokens proportionally.
Project Updates
The Dragon8 hard fork of the sports and entertainment blockchain solution, Chiliz Chain, is scheduled for execution on May 21st. This hard fork will introduce new developer tools and fully implement the previously announced Chiliz Chain Tokenomics 2.0. The annual inflation rate of CHZ will gradually decrease from 8.8% to 1.88% over 14 years and remain unchanged thereafter. Additionally, Chiliz Chain will implement EIP-1559, where most accrued Gas fees will be burned.
The mainnet Revolution consensus upgrade of the decentralized social network L1 DeSo is scheduled for May 22nd. After the consensus upgrade, it will support features such as 500 posts per second (10% of X-scale), maximized burning cost (BMF) algorithm, 1-second confirmation time, staking DESO to earn 20% annualized returns, and permissionless validators.
The Ultimate application will be shut down on May 22nd, 2024. Jupiter has acquired Ultimate Wallet and its mobile team.
The fourth round of retroactive fundraising sign-ups for Optimism will start on May 23rd and end on June 6th. The audit period will be from June 6th to June 18th, and the voting period will be from June 23rd to July 8th. Results will be announced on July 15th, with funding disbursed. In this round, The Optimism Collective will allocate 10 million OP tokens to reward Superchain developers.
The decentralized GPU cloud infrastructure, Aethir, will officially launch the edge computing device Aethir Edge on May 23rd. The first batch of 11,000 devices will be exclusively released to the Aethir community. 23% of the total ATH token supply will be used to incentivize Aethir Edge users. Devices will be sold in multiple rounds, with early registrants eligible for a discounted price of $999 (market price is $1099).
The upgrade to aelf v1.9.0 is expected to take place on May 23rd at 18:00. It should be completed by May 29th. Once aelf v1.9.0 is released, all block producers and full nodes will need to upgrade to the latest version.
The B3TR and VOT3 tokens on the VeChain testnet will be fully projected onto the mainnet on May 26th.
Upcoming Events
ETHBerlin will be held from May 24th to 26th, 2024, at the CIC Innovation Park in Berlin, Germany.
Pai Network and WIF will host the “WIF <> PIONEX COMMUNITY PARTY” offline event at the VIVA PARTY ROOM in Taipei on May 24th at 7:00 PM.
Token Unlocks
According to Token Unlocks data, this week will see major token unlocks for PYTH, AVAX, and ID, totaling over $1.1 billion:
- On May 20th at 10:00 PM UTC, 2.13 billion tokens will unlock, valued at approximately $812 million, representing 141.67% of the circulating supply.
- On May 22nd at 8:00 AM UTC, 9.54 million tokens will unlock, valued at around $340 million, constituting 2.49% of the circulating supply.
- On May 22nd at 8:00 AM UTC, 18.49 million tokens will unlock, valued at approximately $14.26 million, representing 4.29% of the circulating supply.
- On May 25th at 8:00 AM UTC, 4.66 million tokens will unlock, valued at about $507,000, making up 0.48% of the circulating supply.
Governance Voting
The proposal for “Creating a Treasury Steward” will end on May 20th at 23:27 UTC. This proposal suggests creating a smart contract to enable the “Treasury Steward” to execute pre-approved operations and budgets on behalf of the DAO. Additionally, the Aave community’s ARFC proposal to add USDe to Aave V3 on Ethereum will end on May 22nd at 12:03 UTC.
The third round of voting for LFG will commence on May 22nd. The candidates for the third round of LFG include the cross-chain interoperability protocol deBridge, the betting platform Divvy.Bet, and the NFT marketplace Exchange Art.
The proposal regarding the token’s potential listing on the market will end on May 23rd.
The proposal to extend the terms of 7 previously elected Community Stewards until December 31, 2024, will end on May 23rd at 16:36 UTC.
The proposal for “Lido Alliance: Ethereum Alliance Ecosystem” will end on May 24th at 12:00 UTC. This alliance, centered around stETH, suggests creating a dedicated Lido Contributors Alliance Working Group. The purpose of this group is to assess potential new alliance members and help guide the possibility of potential alliances and product development. Partners may choose to provide token airdrops to the alliance.
NFT
Animoca Brands Japan is launching a digital collectible card series featuring Hiro Mashima’s manga “Fairy Tail”. The series will go live on the digital collectibles and NFT marketplace Quidd on May 25th at 05:00 Beijing time.