Foresight News takes you through this week’s hot topics and recommended content:
01 Trump’s Crypto Empire
Bloomberg: The Trump family's business empire
02 Stablecoin Act
Hong Kong's Stablecoin Bill is Implemented, East and West Bet on It at the Same Time
"Stablecoin bill passed, why did FRAX become the biggest winner?"
03Hyperliquid price rises
"Hyperliquid's price breaks through $30 again, and people are questioning why it has emerged so suddenly?"
04Cetus Stolen
"Sui Ecological Project Cetus was stolen for more than 260 million US dollars. Will it return to the pre-liberation era overnight?"
Did Cetus really “recover” $160 million in stolen funds?
05 Project Observation
"Gold Mining Manual | Sahara AI Interactive Guide Quick Reading"
"Gold Rush Manual | Pharos: Modular L1 focusing on high performance and RWA on-chain"
06 Industry Observation
Who is the top money-maker in this crypto cycle?
Web4: From legal currency to social currency — the democratization revolution of currency creation
01 Trump’s Crypto Empire
Trump sees himself as the greatest businessman to ever run for the White House. "I'm the most successful person ever to run for office," he told Iowa reporters in 2015. "One of my Gucci stores is worth more than all of Mitt Romney's assets." That may be an exaggeration, but it's true: A decade later, no modern American president has made his family as wealthy as he has while in office. His net worth has doubled to about $5.4 billion since the early days of his campaign. Recommended reading:
Bloomberg: The Trump family's business empire
During this period, the Trump family accumulated wealth through:
Promoted over $10 billion in real estate projects;
Loss-making social media companies are valued in the billions;
One crypto project alone generated over $500 million in revenue;
He made millions of dollars from holdings in companies that provide financial services, guns and drone parts.
The cryptocurrency promoted by Trump and his three sons went on sale weeks before the 2024 election, with most buyers being overseas investors. After the election, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun injected $75 million into World Liberty Financial during a civil fraud lawsuit with U.S. regulators, which is now on hold. Steve Witkoff, a diplomatic envoy who has met with global leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin, will also profit from the project, whose co-founders include his sons Alex and Zach. A company spokesman said the project has nothing to do with politics, that executives are not government officials, and that there is no conflict of interest. He called Justin Sun an early supporter and said any suggestion that an association with World Liberty Financial would lead to preferential government treatment was absurd.
Trump’s $2.9 billion stake in his eponymous social media startup, which went public during last year’s campaign, makes up the bulk of his wealth. Without Truth Social’s parent company, he might not have made the list of the world’s richest people. The company’s shares fluctuate like meme stocks. Its shares have risen since September despite a net loss of about $401 million last year. After Trump took office, the company moved into finance, launching products that directly benefited from his policies, including a “Made in America” fund, just as he drastically increased tariffs and eased restrictions on digital assets. In March, three days after Trump Media announced a partnership with Crypto.com, the Singaporean company said the SEC had closed its investigation into the company without taking enforcement action. Trump’s shares are held in a trust, and Trump as president continues to post content to the platform, with posts dubbed “truth.”
02 Stablecoin Act
On May 21, the Hong Kong Legislative Council officially passed the Stablecoin Bill in its third reading, marking Hong Kong as the world's first jurisdiction to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for fiat stablecoins. At the same time, on May 20, the U.S. Senate passed the GENIUS Act Stablecoin Bill by an overwhelming majority of 66 votes to 32. Recommended reading:
Hong Kong's Stablecoin Bill is Implemented, East and West Bet on It at the Same Time
After the implementation of the regulations, a number of stablecoins such as FDUSD (First Digital) and TrueUSD will be included in the regulatory framework. Previously, Justin Sun questioning of FDUSD reserves had triggered discussions in Hong Kong about the compliance of stablecoins. The Hong Kong Stablecoin Act clearly stipulates a series of mechanisms to ensure the perfect reserve of stablecoins: First, in terms of reserve asset management and stability, it is required that the market value of the reserve assets of stablecoins must be at least equal to their circulating face value at all times, and the license holder must have a robust stability mechanism, proper reserve asset separation management arrangements and sufficient disclosure policies; second, in terms of the redemption mechanism, it is stipulated that the license holder must pay the face value of the designated stablecoin to the holder who makes a valid redemption request, and no cumbersome conditions and unreasonable fees shall be attached, and the redemption procedures, time limits, relevant conditions, fees and rights must be clearly disclosed; third, the license holder must have an entity company in Hong Kong.
In terms of currency selection, although the current focus of the draft is on the regulation of Hong Kong's local stablecoins, the ordinance also reserves the possibility of incorporating other legal currencies (especially the RMB) into the regulatory framework. Qiu Dagen, a member of the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, also spoke during the deliberation of the draft and said that in addition to the Hong Kong dollar and the US dollar, Hong Kong is also considering incorporating the RMB into legal stablecoins. Fang Hongjin, co-chairman of the Hong Kong Blockchain Association, said that the Hong Kong dollar itself maintains a linked exchange rate with the US dollar, and it is difficult to have an autonomous monetary policy, and then it is difficult to compete with the scale of other stablecoins under the existing system. Councillor Wu Jiezhuang spoke during the deliberation of the draft and said that the stablecoins legislated in this "Draft Ordinance" are based on legal currency assets. Promoting offshore RMB at the level of stablecoin compliance structure will contribute to the national strategy of RMB internationalization. By incorporating RMB stablecoins into the regulatory framework, it will help to obtain more potential capital inflows in the existing market.
On May 20, the US stablecoin legislation bill "GENIUS Act" passed in the Senate vote. There are still two major steps to go before it is officially passed: the House of Representatives vote and the submission to the President for signature. The market previously believed that the Senate vote was the biggest obstacle to the passage of the bill. If nothing unexpected happens, it will only be a matter of time before the bill is completely passed. Which crypto project is the biggest winner of this legislative victory? Judging from the token price performance, it may be Frax Finance. Recommended reading:
" Stablecoin bill passed, why did FRAX become the biggest winner? "
Frax Finance's products are not just stablecoins, but also include liquidity pledge, lending, L2, and so on. But they have a deep connection with stablecoins. Frax was once the issuer of the hybrid algorithmic stablecoin FRAX, but after the Luna UST crash, it gave up the "calculated stability" track and transformed into a fully collateralized stablecoin. Since then, FRAX has been further updated to frxUSD, with fiat currency as collateral, and "the entire roadmap is to become the first licensed fiat currency stablecoin."
Sam Kazemian, the founder of Frax Finance, has frequently posted photos of himself with crypto legislators in Washington, the capital of the United States, since the beginning of this year. It is said that as an industry insider, he was deeply involved in the discussion and drafting of the GENIUS Act. The market seems to be pricing in the regulatory advantage that Frax Finance will have based on this.
The founder actively participated in the legislation related to stablecoins, and actively adjusted its own product roadmap to serve the narrative. With the further implementation of the GENIUS Act, the performance of FXS (FRAX) is worth looking forward to.
03Hyperliquid price rises
On May 22, as BTC broke through the $110,000 mark, HYPE broke through 30 USDT, with a 24-hour increase of 14.79%, and the total FDV stood at $29 billion, jumping to the 14th place in the cryptocurrency market value. On the contrary, a whale has been short HYPE worth $57.14 million with 5x leverage at around $20.4 since May 8, and the current floating loss of the position is $18.8 million. To prevent liquidation, the address has added margin three times, the latest time was "embarrassed" to add $2.04 million USDC two hours ago to avoid forced liquidation of the position. Recommended reading:
After the JELLY short squeeze event subsided, more and more whale began to choose Hyperliquid. According to data from The Block, Hyperliquid had accounted for about 9% of Binance’s contract trading volume for two consecutive months before the short squeeze event.
Hyperliquid chose not the absolute concept of decentralization, but capital efficiency and protocol security first. As Zuo Ye wrote in the article "Hyperliquid: 9% of Binance, 78% of Centralization" - in the Perp DEX sequence, Hyperliquid's innovation is not in the innovation of the architecture, but in the "slightly centralized" way, learning the LP tokenization of GMX, and cooperating with the listing and airdrop strategies, continuously stimulating market competition, and successfully seizing the derivatives market firmly occupied by CEX. This is not to defend hyperliquid, but the background of Perp DEX. If you want absolute decentralized governance, you will not be able to deal with black swan events, and you will not have time to respond quickly. To respond efficiently, you must need a sword holder.
Combining the scale of Hyperliquid and the price performance of Hype, as a TGE project in 24 years, its Perp DEX is a real on-chain demand. In the crypto, being criticized by thousands of people is not terrible, but being irreplaceable is the trump card.
04Cetus Stolen
On the evening of May 22, Cetus Protocol, the liquidity protocol of Sui ecosystem, was reported to have a serious security incident. In order to prevent the situation from getting worse, the parties to the agreement have urgently suspended the operation of its smart contracts. According to Lookonchain monitoring, Cetus Protocol was hacked on SUI, with losses exceeding US$260 million. Hackers are converting the stolen funds into USDC and cross-chaining to Ethereum to exchange for ETH. Currently, about US$60 million of USDC has completed cross-chain. Recommended reading:
Sporadic news began to circulate in the cryptocurrency community that Cetus Protocol might be under attack by hackers. Early signs showed that the protocol's transaction pool deployed on the Sui chain had experienced an abnormal clearing of funds, which quickly aroused the vigilance and uneasiness of market participants. Almost at the same time as the news of the attack came out, the price of Cetus Protocol's native governance token CETUS plummeted. Market data shows that the CETUS token fell by more than a staggering 40% in just two hours, falling rapidly from the price level before the attack, from $0.257 to $0.146, and then rebounded slightly, but still hovered around $0.17.
Faced with a flood of negative news, falling token prices, and widespread panic in the community, the official Cetus Protocol team released a statement through its official channels confirming that the protocol had indeed detected a security incident, and emphasized that "for security reasons, its smart contracts have been temporarily suspended." The team is making every effort to conduct an emergency investigation into the incident and will release further investigation results and subsequent handling statements to the public as soon as possible.
Cetus, the largest decentralized AMM exchange in the Sui ecosystem, was stolen more than $200 million yesterday by an attacker who fabricated liquidity due to a code problem with numerical precision. Two hours after the theft, Cetus posted a statement: "So far, it has been confirmed that an attacker has stolen approximately $223 million from the Cetus protocol. The team has taken action to lock the contract to prevent further theft of funds, and has frozen $162 million of stolen funds. We are currently working with the Sui Foundation and other ecosystem members to develop the next solution, with the goal of recovering the remaining stolen funds. Most of the affected funds have been suspended, and we are actively seeking ways to recover the remaining funds. A full incident report will be released later." Recommended reading:
" Did Cetus really "recover" $160 million in stolen funds? "
Except for the funds that the hacker transferred to the Ethereum mainnet and exchanged for more than 20,000 ETH (about 60 million US dollars), most of the stolen funds are still in the hacker's Sui chain address. The "freezing" of this part of the assets is actually the joint "censorship" of the relevant addresses by Sui's validators - everyone agreed to ignore it. Objectively speaking, this violates the principle of "Censorship Resistant" in the decentralized world, and is a centralized operation, which has caused great controversy in the community.
The author supports this approach. Cetus is the largest decentralized AMM exchange on Sui, and the liquidity pool contains the savings and survival funds of countless people. At the same time, the main liquidity pools of many Sui project tokens are deployed on Cetus, and the withdrawal of liquidity is an unbearable loss for these ecological projects. It can be said that taking back this money is a necessary protection for the Sui DeFi ecosystem, which was thriving but far from mature.
If you would rather let it all go down the drain in order to stick to the doctrine of "decentralization", it seems like you are a fundamentalist who chose to stick to ETC (Ethereum Classic) after the hard fork of Ethereum The DAO. I tend to agree with the following view: decentralization is a goal, not a starting point. At this stage, if I pursue extreme decentralization, I will choose to use Ethereum. And now I am happy that Sui can help users who have been damaged in Cetus recover their funds.
05 Project Observation
On Monday (May 19), AI-native full-stack Web3 platform Sahara AI officially launched its public beta network SIWA, opening AI creation, collaboration and monetization channels to all chain developers. Sahara AI said that SIWA is the first public entrance of the Sahara blockchain. As the underlying infrastructure, its core function is to provide verifiable ownership, licensing management and on-chain monetization capabilities for AI assets such as data sets and models, and establish a credible and traceable AI collaboration standard. Recommended reading:
" Gold Mining Manual | Sahara AI Interactive Guide Quick Reading "
The SIWA testnet will be rolled out in four phases:
Phase 1 (current): Focusing on "decentralized data rights confirmation", supporting users to register their own data sets on the chain, minting data ownership certificates in the ERC-721 format, and giving data traceable, valuable, and divisible asset attributes.
Subsequent stages: Gradually launch licensing and revenue distribution mechanisms, permissionless open source testnets, automatic revenue sharing pipelines and other functions.
In terms of the team, Sahara AI co-founder and CEO Sean Ren is also an associate professor at the University of Southern California. He has won honors such as MIT TR Innovator Under 35 (Asia Pacific) and Forbes Asia Under 30. Another co-founder and COO Tyler Zhou once served as the investment director of Binance Labs.
The rewards center shows that by collecting enough fragments in each desert, you can awaken its guardian and claim a soul-bound NFT on the Sahara testnet to commemorate the achievements and contributions made in the early development of the Sahara AI ecosystem. Once all five desert guardian NFTs are collected, you can create an exclusive Bitsy Soulbound NFT on the Sahara testnet.
As a modular blockchain focusing on high performance and RWA on-chain, it claims to be able to achieve 30,000 TPS and 1 second final confirmation of transaction performance. In addition, the blockchain-based verifiable storage solution can save 80.3% of storage costs, which has attracted the market's attention to the new generation of Web3 infrastructure. This article will introduce it from the dimensions of team background, technical architecture, ecological layout and interaction methods. Recommended reading:
" Gold Rush Manual | Pharos: Modular L1 focusing on high performance and RWA on-chain "
Pharos is an EVM-compatible modular and full-stack parallel L1 blockchain network that focuses on high throughput, low latency, scalability, and supports heterogeneous computing and cross-chain interoperability. Its core goal is to provide enterprise-level infrastructure for Web3 applications while supporting the integration of RWA and DeFi. From the Pharos documentation, the Pharos framework is similar to the Cosmos SDK and supports building L1 or L2 on this infrastructure.
Pharos co-founder and CEO Alex Zhang once revealed to The Block that real-time payments and RWA are the two main use cases that Pharos prioritizes. Pharos has also established a strategic partnership with ZAN, the Web3 brand of Ant Digital Technology under Ant Group, and the two parties aim to jointly develop Web3 infrastructure focusing on node services, security, and hardware. Alex Zhang emphasized that the cooperation with ZAN will focus on the RWA use case, while another cooperation with the Global Stablecoin Payment Network (WSPN) will also focus on the stablecoin payment use case.
Considering that Pharos adopted the SAFE form in last year’s seed round of financing, with token warrants attached, and the testnet has deployed the native token PHRS as network fees, we can reasonably expect Pharos to launch its native token. Pharos Official Twitter said that within 24 hours of the Pharos testnet going online, there were more than 110,000 real users.
06 Industry Observation
"I lost millions last year," Xiao Su told Foresight News. As an old investor in the crypto, he bought a lot of VC coins in the last bull market cycle. In 2021, Bitcoin once broke through $67,000, setting a record high. Many VC coins rose, and the increase was even higher than Bitcoin. Xiao Su's first pot of gold came from this. However, the market is unpredictable, and Xiao Su fell in this cycle. Since 2024, many VC coins he heavily invested in have performed poorly, and they have continued to fall. He was forced to become a diamond hand and could not bear it. He could only sell at a low point. After doing this again and again, most of his accumulated gains have been lost. Recommended reading:
Who is the top money-maker in this crypto cycle?
"Why is it so difficult to make money this time? Who is making money in the market?" Xiao Su is very puzzled. In his opinion, in the past bull market cycle, you could make money by buying coins with your eyes closed, lying down or sleeping, but now you have to "run fast" to make money. Market participants such as VCs, market makers, exchanges, project parties, retail investors, and hair-pulling studios are all facing new challenges.
Bitcoin buyers have undoubtedly made a lot of money in this cycle. On May 10, data from Bitcoin Magazine Pro showed that only 0.55% of Bitcoin addresses were still losing money after breaking through $100,000, which shows that most Bitcoin players in the market are in a profitable state. As of press time, Bitcoin has broken through $110,000, setting a new record high. No one has lost money from buying Bitcoin, and all buyers have made profits.
Meme is no longer just entertainment, it has become a new experimental field for wealth distribution mechanisms. According to statistics from Coingecko and Dune Analytics, in 2024, the total market value of Meme coins soared from less than $2 billion to more than $60 billion, with an increase of more than 2,900% during the year. Among them, the market value of Meme coins on the Solana chain alone accounts for more than 1/3. WIF once rose from an initial market value of less than $1 million to more than $3 billion, and early holders even received more than 100,000 times the return. A user purchased a new Meme coin BOME for less than $200 in April 2024, and the account value soared to more than $2 million in just 72 hours.
TL;DR: The article proposes that Web4: Social Currency will become the next stage of Internet evolution. Its core is to liberate the right to create currency from the hands of governments and financial institutions, and give the community the ability to independently design, issue and manage currency. The following are the key points: Recommended reading:
Web4: From legal currency to social currency — the democratization revolution of currency creation
Web4 will replicate the "user-generated content" model of Web2, but apply it to the field of currency: billions of people will become creators, distributors and users of currency.
Money is no longer limited to government fiat or a few assets, but is evolving into a diverse set of tools that reflect community values (such as addressing climate change, supporting local economies, etc.).
The essence of money is a tool for coordinating social behavior, and its function goes far beyond economic exchange. By designing the rules and incentives of money, the community can promote collective actions (such as environmental protection, fair distribution, etc.).
Bitcoin is the first successful case: its asset value and social mission (financial sovereignty) reinforce each other, proving that currency can serve as both a speculative asset and a link to social movements.
Traditional economics assumes that currency competition is a zero-sum game, but Web4 advocates the coexistence of diversity: the success of one currency can enhance the credibility of other currencies (such as Bitcoin giving birth to Ethereum and other ecosystems).
Currency diversity corresponds to human cultural diversity. Each currency remains scarce in specific scenarios (such as community tokens), but the overall system can be expanded infinitely.
Each stage of the Internet represented a new frontier in human connectivity, empowering us to reimagine how society coordinates. Now, with the advent of Web4, we are liberating the concept of money itself, revolutionizing how we collectively define, create, and use money.
Just as Web2 democratized media, shifting power from centralized institutions to billions of individual creators, Web4 will democratize money creation. Billions of users will become creators, distributors, and everyday users of a diverse range of currencies. Money in Web4 will be as different from traditional fiat currencies as a TikTok video is from a BBC broadcast, providing communities with unprecedented creative expression in the financial sector.
