Weekly Editors Picks is a functional column of Odaily Planet Daily. In addition to covering a large amount of real-time information every week, Planet Daily also publishes a lot of high-quality in-depth analysis content, but they may be hidden in the information flow and hot news, and pass you by.
Therefore, every Saturday, our editorial department will select some high-quality articles that are worth spending time reading and collecting from the content published in the past 7 days, and bring new inspiration to you in the crypto world from the perspectives of data analysis, industry judgment, and opinion output.
Now, come and read with us:
Investment and Entrepreneurship
In 2022, crypto venture capital investment reached $23 billion; in 2024, this figure dropped to $6 billion. Many of the largest exits in the crypto industry come from token listings, but when most token listings are trending negatively, investors exits become difficult.
Fundraising is difficult and concentrated in a few large companies. In the future, it will be more difficult to raise venture financing, and the strategy of hastily issuing a token and hoping that people buy it on an exchange is no longer viable.
History of VC asset bubbles: Why does every new coin seem to return to zero?
Venture capital funds have performed poorly in recent years, and venture capital firms are turning to short-term selling to return capital to LPs. Many well-known crypto venture capital firms may not survive in the next few years.
The misalignment between VC incentives and timelines and founders’ goals is driving a shift toward community-driven funding (projects are more likely to raise funds through community power rather than relying on VCs) and long-term liquidity (liquidity funding is increasingly becoming the main force in long-term token support compared to VCs).
Judging from the total amount of on-chain holdings, the companies with larger capital scale include Jump Trading, Wintermute, QCP Capital, GSR Markets, B2C 2 Group, Cumberland DRW, Amber Group, and Flow Traders, which are also well-known market makers in the market.
Passive market makers mainly place maker orders on both sides of the order book of centralized exchanges to provide market liquidity. They are more neutral and do not dominate the price of coins. The strategies and technologies they provide are also relatively standard.
Active market makers are mostly anonymous due to the high compliance risks. Some active market makers may be disguised as investment institutions, incubators, etc.
Market makers may not be the culprits, but they are indeed the main tool for implementing operations. As a service provider, market makers are more often a gun and a tool. The needs of exchanges and project parties are the starting point. In the bull market, the entire system jointly creates huge profits, so all stakeholders can maintain the minimum harmony. But in the bear market, this entire chain has accelerated the outbreak of the liquidity crisis, and the drama of tearing faces and blaming each other is staged again.
The current predicament of the crypto market is not entirely caused by market makers. Although they are the direct creators of the false prosperity, the entire chain of interests also includes project owners, VCs, KOLs, and LuMao studios.
Dragonfly Partner: How I Missed the Opportunity to Invest in Solana’s Seed Round
“I turned down a seed investment in @solana at $0.04 in early 2018. At today’s prices, that’s a 3250x miss. Solana was one of the first projects I evaluated as a junior VC. I was endearingly naive and confident back then, and wrote memos for every project I passed on. Rereading that memo now is peak junior VC cringe. We were all obsessed with finding Ethereum killers, consensus protocols, and what tech would replace EVM/eWASM.”
Haseeb also attached the completely unedited original memo (the worst investment MISS of his career).
Solana co-founder Toly then responded: All your concerns were indeed reasonable. This is essentially a bet - a bet on whether we can solve these problems while maintaining the underlying advantages that other teams do not have. Haseeb then replied to Toly: I think this is the lesson. Your persistence in underlying optimization and unique attack angles is something that other teams do not have. This kind of maximizing strengths and avoiding weaknesses is the most important thing. I was completely unaware of this at the time.
Interview with Eugene: Golden Rules of Top Traders
Believe in the power of heavy positions, don’t be obsessed with positions, avoid emotional operations, and learn to stop losses and withdraw funds in time...
Also recommended: Trading experience of overseas A8 bosses: Be brave to take profits and stop losses, slow is fast, identify the true god BTC The code of eternal profit: a guide to perpetual contract arbitrage The pain caused by returning to long-termism makes the pricing strategy a double-edged sword .
Airdrop Opportunities and Interaction Guide
Inventory of 6 popular test network interactions in 2025 (with detailed tutorials)
Lens Protocol, Towns, Grass Network, Plasma, Chaos Labs, Monad.
Also recommended: Airdrop Weekly Report | Babylon airdrop registration deadline extended to March 19; Bedrock open airdrop query (3.10-3.16) This weeks selected interactive projects: Dapp Portal games, GRVT trading volume, Halliday early bird application .
Meme
Playing with BNB Chain: Inventory of Coin Hunter Strategies and Tools
“Changpeng Zhao and Yi He’s Narrative Capture” toolkit: Twitter pop-ups, DeBot, chain.fm;
“KOL signal enhancement strategy” tool combination: GMGN KOL/VC monitoring, DeBot AI signal, chain.fm KOL channel;
Data-driven sniping tool combination: GMGN, chain.fm, DeBot, ave.ai;
Address monitoring and following orders tool combination: GMGN, chain.fm, DeBot, ave.ai.
Ethereum and Scaling
Can the free gas fee offered by all companies retain users?
In just 30 days, 89 projects on 9 blockchains completed more than 2 million gas-free transactions, saving up to $117,000 in gas fees.
This wave of gas-free transactions shows that solutions like Paymaster in ERC-4337 smart wallets can quickly increase on-chain activity by paying fees for users, but the real test lies in repeated user participation.
Multi-ecology and cross-chain
By analyzing the complete steps of a transaction from creation to final status update - including creation and initiation, broadcasting, sorting, execution and status update - we can clearly grasp the design ideas and technical choices of the public chain.
Aptos: optimistic parallelism and high-performance design; Ethereum: a benchmark for serial execution; Solana: extreme optimization of deterministic parallelism.
The core idea of optimistic parallelism is to assume that transactions processed in parallel will not conflict, so the application does not need to submit a transaction statement before the transaction is executed. If a conflict is found during verification after the transaction is executed, Block-STM will re-execute the affected transaction to ensure consistency. However, in practice, if the transaction dependencies are not confirmed in advance to be conflicting, a large number of errors may occur during the actual execution, causing the public chain to run slowly. Therefore, optimistic parallelism does not simply assume that there is no conflict in transactions, but avoids risks in advance at a certain stage, which is the transaction broadcast stage.
Nodes are malicious and cut off users? Why Solana has become the hardest hit area of MEV
Being sandwiched is a sandwich attack, which is a common MEV (maximum extractable value) strategy and a common problem in the AMM market.
MEV on Solana was not very prominent until Jito launched the MEV reward protocol. Today, more than 66% of validators have adopted the Jito-Solana client, which allows users to pay tips to allow validators to pack first. At the same time, Jito also runs a memory pool (Mempool), which allows sandwich attackers to monitor user transactions. Although Jito closed Mempool in March 2024 to try to reduce such attacks, MEV robots can still continue to monitor transactions by running RPC nodes, and the attack has not stopped.
Solana is fast but centralized, and attackers can exploit loopholes using private nodes, and the Jito system cannot stop them. Ethereum relies on fee competition and MEV-Boost, plus a decentralized structure, to provide better protection. If Solana wants to solve the problem, it must optimize the mechanism and decentralize power.
For P players, the first principle when charging on-chain is to avoid setting too high slippage. It is recommended to rationally set a reasonable slippage range of 0.5%-1% according to market fluctuations. If using AMM for trading, the anti-MEV protection function should be actively enabled. This mechanism can significantly reduce the possibility of transactions being monitored by malicious nodes and implemented by pincer attacks through technical means such as confusing transaction paths and delaying broadcasts.
BSC ecosystem heats up: 7 popular memes and 5 un-coined projects
Arabic concept meme: $mubarak, $Mubarakah, $QMubarak;
Community concept Meme: $BNB Card, $DDDD, $TUT, $Palu;
Representative projects that have received financing but have not yet issued tokens include APRO, Astherus, KiloEx, LoopCrypto, and Sign Protocol.
DeFi
Web3 AI
Is AI Agents continued decline caused by the recently popular MCP protocol?
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open source standardized protocol designed to allow various AI LLM/Agents to seamlessly connect to various data sources and tools. It is equivalent to a plug-and-play USB universal interface, replacing the previous end-to-end specific packaging method. Manus + MCP has severely impacted Web3 AI Agent. Since a number of web3 AI Agent frameworks and services only solve the needs of quick development and application similar to web2 AI Agent, but cannot keep up with the innovation speed of web2 in terms of technical services, standards and differentiated advantages, the market/capital has revalued and priced the previous batch of web3 AI Agents.
In addition to the quick deployment + multi-agent collaborative communication framework + Tokenomic coin issuance narrative of web2, web3 AI Agent has many innovative directions of web3 Native worth exploring: for example, equipped with a distributed consensus collaboration framework, considering the characteristics of LLM large model off-chain computing + on-chain state storage, many adaptive components are required.
The key to conquering the real web3 AI Agent should be how to make the complex workflow of the AI Agent and the trust verification flow of the blockchain as compatible as possible.
Hot Topics of the Week
In the past week, in terms of policies and macro markets, the SEC made it clear that PoW mining does not constitute securities issuance ( analysis ); Trump: Stablecoins will help expand the dominance of the US dollar and called on Congress to legislate; Bowman will serve as the new Vice Chairman of Supervision of the Federal Reserve ; Telegram founder Pavel Durov has been allowed to leave France and is returning to Dubai;
In terms of opinions and voices, Trump gave a speech at the DAS Summit saying that he would not be as stupid as Biden and sell government holdings at a price far below long-term value ( full text ); CryptoQuant CEO: Bitcoin bull market cycle is over ; Arthur Hayes: BTC may have bottomed out , but US stocks may still have room to fall; Matrixport: $90,000 may be a key price indicator for judging the future direction of BTC; Dragonfly partner: Recently communicated with the Ethereum Foundation and is now bullish on ETH ; Trader Eugene: Has tried to buy AI-related tokens with a small position , believing that it has fallen too much and has naturally bottomed out; CZ: Buy TST and Mubarak to do some testing on the weekend; CZ: The voting mechanism for listing coins has a good initial effect, but long-term development will tear the community apart and trigger mutual attacks; CZ: Has been waiting for the AI hype to subside before starting to promote BNB AI ; The 50x leveraged whale on Hyperliquid changed its account to MELANIA on DeBank and certified the official X account , and the crypto KOL targeted His whaling operation failed , and ZachXBT called it a gambling operation by cyber criminals, exposing his true identity ;
In terms of institutions, large companies and top projects, Trump media executives set up SPAC companies, planning to raise $179 million to acquire crypto and defense-related companies ; Metaplanet, a Japanese listed company, appointed Eric Trump, the second son of Trump , as a member of the strategic advisory committee; Binance launched Binance Alpha 2.0 , integrating CEX and DEX transactions; He Yi: Anti-squeeze is now online on BNB, and serious squeezes can apply for compensation within 24 hours; Binance launched the first voting coin listing event and the first voting coin delisting event; OKX suspended DEX aggregator trading services ; Aaves proposed new coin issuance caused controversy; CRO performed the most absurd governance farce in history; EOS announced that it would change its brand name to Vaulta and transform to Web3 banking business;
In terms of meme, CZ concept coin Mubarak and other popular memes have boosted the popularity of Middle Eastern memes on BNB Chain.
According to data, the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group already owns about 13,562 BTC; on March 16, the revenue of the pump.fun protocol was the lowest in four months;
In terms of security, Berally, a social trading platform of Berachain ecosystem, was suspected of being attacked . Officials reminded users to temporarily revoke dApp and Staking permissions; Kaito AI X account was stolen , and officials clarified that no wallet was stolen; gaming platform Wemix was hacked in February and lost $6.22 million. The CEO admitted that the notification was delayed but denied intentional concealment; Four.Meme attackers profited by manipulating the transaction sequence and liquidity pool status. Four.Meme later restored the Launch function and started compensation; AIXBT was suspected of being phished for 55.5 ETH; Watcher.Guru X account was hacked... Well, it was another week of ups and downs.
Attached is a portal to the “Weekly Editor’s Picks” series.
See you next time~
