PA Daily | Argentine President responds to LIBRA controversy saying it has not been promoted, but only shared; Meteora Ben resigns
Reprinted from panewslab
02/18/2025·2MToday's news tips:
Market News: LIBRA team is negotiating with the Nigerian government to launch Meme Coin
Matrixport: XRP rebound signal appears, but SEC regulatory uncertainty remains
KernelDAO will conduct $KERNEL token TGE in February
Hyper Foundation: HyperEVM mainnet has been officially launched
Meteora Lianchuang Ben resigns and has hired a law firm to issue a LIBRA investigation report
Argentine President: LIBRA is not promoted, but only shared LIBRA information
Regulatory/Macro
According to SolanaFloor, on February 17, 2025, DefiTuna founder Moty publicly announced through the X platform that DefiTuna has refunded Kelsier, an investor who invested $30,000 in the project on January 16, 2025, and cut off its All contact. This decision came after Kelsier's alleged involvement in market manipulation, especially its association with LIBRA, MELANIA and meme launchpad platform M3M3 was exposed. Moty disclosed a series of suspected orchestrated token manipulations that have caused community members to suffer large-scale withdrawals. "After discovering Kelsier's activity, we have refunded Kelsier and cut off all contact," Moty wrote. After announcing the decision, Moty elaborated on his concerns in a series of posts, claiming that Kelsier was involved," he wrote. A carefully planned plan to withdraw large amounts of funds from the meme coin launchpad platform M3M3. Meteora leadership, including Ben, facilitated a large number of influencers who have gained huge benefits at the expense of the community. Despite direct contact with Meteora's core contributors, they showed little sense of responsibility. Meteora's co-founder Ben said he would resign after being questioned, but only made an vague public response. "I personally have done my best to risk myself and everything we have built at DefiTuna, trying to get the key figures to speak out, start identifying these bad guys and clear them out," Moty said. SolanaFloor contacted Moty for more information DefiTuna interacts with Kelsier and gain insight into how the M3M3 platform powered by Meteora works. Moty described DefiTuna's interaction with Kelsier in detail, revealing that Kelsier contacted them through Lebanese employee Thomas and asked for assistance in providing liquidity for the M3M3. Initially, the M3M3 was promoted as an independent platform, but it was later revealed that Ben has become its owner. Kelsier's participation requires projects launched on M3M3 to allocate a percentage of token supply to them. Vlad, co-founder of DefiTuna, came passively in the process of believing that the cooperation was legal. Moty revealed that Kelsier personally asked them to provide liquidity for the M3M3, and Meteora co-founder Ben prohibited any transactions outside of Meteora. When DefiTuna proposed a neutral liquidity allocation strategy, they were ignored. Moty said more than $200 million was stolen in several projects including AIAI, MATES, ENRON, Melania and Libra. Screenshots show that Hayden shared the minting addresses of the tokens with a group of influencers in front of the official launchpad, allowing them to buy in advance and make substantial profits. When asked about the total profit Kelsier earned from M3M3, Moty replied: "If you count AIAI, MATES, ENRON, a bunch of other projects... Melania and LIBRA... it's over $200 million. There are many other projects.”
According to Cryptoslate, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has initiated a public consultation on guidelines for evaluating the knowledge and capabilities of professionals providing cryptoasset services under the Cryptoslate Market Regulation (MiCA). The consultation was released on February 17 and aims to standardize the qualifications and experience that individuals need to provide consulting or information to clients on digital assets. The draft guidelines set clear standards for professional qualifications, work experience and continuing education for employees employed by cryptoasset service providers (CASPs). Under the proposal, individuals who provide investment advice on crypto assets must meet stricter capabilities requirements than those who provide basic information services. ESMA outlines the advisor must have a higher education degree or equivalent, receive at least 160 hours of professional training, and have at least one year of relevant experience. Those who provide general information on crypto assets need at least 80 hours of professional qualification training and six months of supervised experience. All professionals must pass the assessment exam and complete ongoing training – at least 10 hours per year for the information provider and at least 20 hours per year for the consultant – to ensure their knowledge is kept up to date. The guidelines also highlight the importance of understanding the risks of crypto assets, including market volatility, cybersecurity threats, blockchain governance, and liquidity risks associated with major asset holders. Additionally, ESMA proposes that businesses should conduct annual internal reviews to assess whether employees comply with these standards. Market participants including CASPs, investors, financial institutions and industry associations were invited to provide feedback on the proposed criteria. ESMA will accept comments until April 22, 2025 and is expected to issue final guidelines in the third quarter of that year.
According to the Hong Kong Radio website, Ye Zhiheng, executive director of the Intermediary Department of the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission, is expected to announce the virtual asset development roadmap within this month. In addition to explaining the development principles, the roadmap will also mention the scope of the short-term expectations and market research of the Securities Regulatory Commission, as well as Where platform participants want to optimize. In addition, the focus of the virtual asset roadmap is not on the content itself, but on the CSRC’s courage to show the principles to the market and the approach to market considerations.
Market News: LIBRA team is negotiating with the Nigerian government to launch Meme Coin
According to unconfirmed reports of Beincrypto's signings, the LIBRA team also negotiated with Nigerian officials on the issuance of another unstable meme currency. As of now, there is no evidence that Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has a direct connection with LIBRA, but his team is reportedly in close negotiations. Hayden Davis, CEO of LIBRA market makers, claimed he had received a lot of invitations to assist with more "rug pull" scams. The controversial meme coin LIBRA endorsed by Argentine President Javier Milei has become the core of mass fraud allegations. President Milei denied ties to LIBRA after the market cap plummeted and faced threats of investigation and impeachment. What is even more shocking is that the LIBRA team plans to join forces with the Nigerian government to launch a new meme coin. The key figure connecting LIBRA and Nigerian officials is Hayden Davis, CEO of Kelsier Ventures. He is a U.S. citizen, thus likely giving the FBI and the Department of Justice jurisdiction to investigate the LIBRA incident. Previously, Davis casually admitted several major financial crimes in a long interview. He said the crimes brought him new opportunities. Community detectives speculated that Davis was behind Memecoin MELANIA and related scams, and he confirmed the allegations in an interview. In other words, MELANIA may have allowed Davis to gain access to Nigerian officials before LIBRA. Reports cannot confirm whether the Nigerian president is involved in the program. However, Davis said “the project has been going well” and several members of his team were actively involved. Nigeria's recent enthusiasm for the cryptocurrency sector has added credibility to these claims.
According to Cryptoslate, as of December 31, 2024, institutional investors held 25.4% of the spot Bitcoin ETF managed assets (AUM), with a total amount of US$26.8 billion. Vetle Lunde, head of research at K33 Research, said the proportion of Bitcoin ETF managed assets held by institutional investors increased by 113% from the third to the fourth quarter of 2024. In addition, as total assets under management jumped 69% to US$78.8 billion at the end of the fourth quarter, the proportion of managed assets held by institutional investors also increased by 4.1% quarterly. According to Lunde, the number of investors who contacted Bitcoin through ETFs reached 1,576 last quarter, a quarterly increase of 37.4% and an annual increase of 68.2%. Lunde's data also shows that institutions' interest in BlackRock's IBIT increased by more than 4 times in 2024. At the end of the fourth quarter of last year, institutions held IBIT shares at $16 billion, while the amount held through shares at the end of the first quarter was less than $4 billion, with most of the growth occurring between the third and fourth quarters. According to Bold Report, BlackRock spot Bitcoin ETF has $56.4 billion in assets under management, while all other spot Bitcoin ETFs traded in the United States have a combined $56.9 billion in assets under management.
US Stock Exchange MEMX applies to SEC to approve its listing of 21Shares XRP ETF
According to Cointelegraph, the US Stock Exchange MEMX has applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to request approval to list the 21Shares XRP ETF as a "commodity trust", and the relevant documents have been submitted to the regulatory authorities. The move marks another effort by the U.S. exchange to list ETFs containing spot XRP. This application also highlights the SEC's shift in its cryptocurrency stance.
AI
xAI launches Grok-3 smart search engine called Deepsearch
According to Jinshi, xAI launched a Grok-3 smart search engine called Deepsearch.
Musk's xAI releases Grok 3 chatbot, mathematical inference performance exceeds GPT4o
According to Cailianshe, Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI released the Grok 3 chatbot. According to xAI engineers, Grok 3 involves training that is 10 times that of Grok 2. Musk said that in terms of mathematical reasoning, scientific logical reasoning and code writing, Grok-3 has achieved better results than DeepSeek-v3, GPT-4o, and Gemini-2 pro in many benchmark tests.
Musk confirms xAI will open an AI game studio soon
According to Jin Shi, on February 17, overseas blogger Dima Zeniuk posted a photo of Elon Musk and many people on the X platform, and wrote that xAI will soon open an AI game studio. Musk himself later confirmed the news, stressing that "this thing must be done well" and reiterating "making the game great again!"
According to Zhitong Finance Network, people familiar with the matter revealed that OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever is raising more than $1 billion for his AI startup Safe Superintelligence, valued it with a valuation of more than $30 billion, thus leaping into the world's most valuable private sector. Among the technology companies. Greenoaks Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, is leading the round with a planned investment of $500 million, people familiar with the matter said. Greenoaks has also previously invested in AI companies ScaleAI and Databricks. Greenoaks Capital Partners, a well-known venture capital firm based in San Francisco, is leading the investment in Safe Superintelligence, with a planned investment of up to $500 million, the person familiar with the matter said. It is worth noting that Greenoaks is also an important investor in Scale AI and Databricks Inc., an outstanding company in the field of artificial intelligence. This background undoubtedly adds more expectations to the future development of Safe Superintelligence. It is reported that this financing will significantly push up Sutskever's valuation, which has achieved a significant increase compared to the previous $5 billion. However, it is worth noting that financing negotiations are still in full swing, and there is still a possibility of changes in relevant details.
Project News
Ethereum core developer Justin.eth Drake shared the progress of Beam Chain’s first community conference call on Twitter, while announcing February 28 as the time for the second conference call, which will focus on technological progress. Since the "Beam" name involves trademark issues, the project will be renamed. The meeting summarized the joining of 8 new teams, the support of 6 mainnet consensus layer teams, and the introduction of 2 new coordinators who joined the Ethereum Foundation. At present, Beam Chain has a total of 14 consensus-level teams, covering all continents except Antarctica, using multiple programming languages including Zig, C, C++, C#, etc., and has emerged with multiple self-funded teams. Justin believes that Beam Chain provides an excellent entry point for developers to deeply understand the underlying technology of Ethereum L1. In addition, the conference explored the key role of ZKVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) technology in Beam Chain and announced a series of research and development plans, including ZK acceleration and multilingual support. Previously, researchers from the Ethereum Foundation proposed the consensus layer upgrade proposal "Beam Chain", which is called "Ethereum 3.0" by the community.
KernelDAO will conduct $KERNEL token TGE in February
The re-staking platform KernelDAO officially announced that the $KERNEL token generation event (TGE) is scheduled to be held in February 2025, and the specific date has not been announced yet. It is reported that 55% will be allocated to community rewards and airdrops (20% for airdrops, 35% for future community rewards), 5% will be allocated to ecosystems and partners, 20% for private placement sales, and 20% will be allocated to teams and Advisor (The team has a 6-month lock-up period with private equity sales tokens and unlocks within 24 months). In addition, 20% of KERNEL tokens will be distributed through three rounds of airdrops. Previous news, BNB Chain Eco-Re-mortgage Infrastructure Kernel has completed a total of US$10 million in financing, and investors include Binance Labs.
Hyper Foundation: HyperEVM mainnet has been officially launched
The Hyper Foundation stated on the X platform that HyperEVM has been officially launched. This is an important step towards achieving universal programmability in Hyperliquid's high-performance financial system, thus accommodating all financial visions. The initial mainnet release of HyperEVM includes: 1. HyperEVM blocks built as part of L1 execution, inheriting all security from the HyperBFT consensus; 2. Instant transfer between native spot HYPE and HyperEVM HYPE; reminder that HYPE is HyperEVM native gas tokens; 3. Standardized WHYPE system contract deployed in 0x555...5 for DeFi applications. In future network upgrades, common ERC20 native transfer and precompilation will be enabled. While these features have been implemented on the test network, the mainnet release is staged to minimize the impact on existing users on L1. HyperEVM can be combined with L1 status without affecting the low-latency transaction experience of existing users.
Jupiter co-founder meow said on X platform: “As Meteora co-founder, I want to reaffirm my confidence that no one in Jupiter or Meteora will engage in any insider trading or financial wrongdoing, nor will it be improper. Way to obtain any tokens. Secondly, we are hiring an independent third party (law firm Fenwick & West) to investigate and publish a report, and they will publish the report independently. Thirdly, I support Ben and his statement. He said with There is no financial misconduct when dealing with partners, I believe him. Meteora has been operating as an independent entity for over a year, and Ben has been operating it without my significant involvement. Although full of Ben's character Confidence, but as the project leader, Ben has insufficient judgment and attention on the core aspects of the project over the past few months, which is unacceptable. Therefore, Ben has chosen to resign and will look for a new leadership for Meteora. Ben is in the ecosystem He has always been helpful and hopes that everyone will remain friendly during his clarification of the facts."
According to Cryptoslate, version 1.15.2 of the Ethereum protocol key client Geth has been released to fix a bug that affected the creation of mainnet blocks in the previous version. According to Go Ethereum, the emergency update resolves a regression problem in the beacon consensus engine that causes validators to miss out on blocking opportunities and potentially cause economic losses. A regression problem in earlier versions affected the consensus engine's handling of mainnet block construction because it did not take into account the situation where MergeNetsplitBlock was not defined in the chain configuration. This change was introduced in a recent update to the beacon consensus engine, resulting in the mainnet not being recognized as running under the PoS mechanism, thus undermining block creation and network expected performance. The developer details the regression problem originated from the removal of a test method called TestingTTDBlock. This method was initially added during internal testing and was used to mock Merge blocks. After removing this method, the system no longer bypasses the dependency on the total difficulty, which previously allowed the engine to ignore the normal forking order and inadvertently enabled Merge before the London fork. It is recommended that users running version 1.15.1 upgrade to version 1.15.2 immediately to avoid missing block creation opportunities and incur financial penalties. Geth v1.15.2 now provides a configuration that correctly identifies the mainnet as merged status and restores the necessary network discovery protocols, thus restoring the expected operating parameters.
GetTrumpMemes will airdrop TRUMP tokens to users who buy Trump products by February 15
According to Cointelegraph, GetTrumpMemes announced that it will airdrop TRUMP tokens to users who purchase Trump-related peripheral products by February 15.
Viewpoint
Matrixport: XRP rebound signal appears, but SEC regulatory uncertainty remains
Matrixport analysis pointed out that the recent trend of XRP on USDT has changed from a long-term sideways to a rapid rise, and the complexity of market chart analysis has increased. In trading strategies, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) is a commonly used indicator. Historical data shows that when RSI is close to 40%, the probability of XRP rebounding is higher, while when RSI is close to 70%, it may enter an overbought state. Currently, XRP's RSI is about 40%, and the technical point of view still has upward potential. Especially after the new US government comes to power, the SEC may re-examine the lawsuit against Ripple Labs, which brings some uncertainty to the market. Analysts believe that there may still be further upside potential for the recent rebound of XRP.
Cos, the founder of Slow Fog, posted on X platform that the address doodo...kqg7 "tested" the following three CAs as soon as possible after Argentina President Mile tweeted. Ordinary people may think there is nothing good to ask about this. , but what is interesting is that these three CAs actually come from the same person (the relationship cannot be directly seen on the chain, and our various data are crossed). So I said that the owner of this address should know what happened, maybe it was really just performing his routine test at Jupiter. ARG CA: ZRfYvM1aNWyqAbhaN1jGmgwBgbed6ah6Xo2qFZNGaPQLIBRA CA:ApxSjBnuVF18mrWFm3PveMZseCJoLETmVN8wvfU9hTwb (yes, it is not the real $LIBRA)SPL Token CA: Bo9jh3wsmcC2AjakLWzNmKJ3SgtZmXEcSaW7L2FAvUsU (yes, it is the real $LIBRA) Cosine said that it posted the above post because Jupiter's tweet mentioned: " If there is evidence that Jupiter employees have leaked information or have other sniped, please contact us directly. If we find that a team member uses non-public information to operate, we will act quickly and decisively."
Argentine President: LIBRA is not promoted, but only shared LIBRA information
Argentine President Mile said on a TV show, "I acted in goodwill and got hit. The country did not lose money, and Argentines lost at most four or five. The vast majority of investors are Chinese and Americans. I share this Message, like hundreds of things I've shared. My tweets were sent three minutes after the currency was created because I was passionate about these things and got to know it. These people are volatility traders, Know what you are doing. It is fake to say that 44,000 people are affected, and at most only 5,000 people are. The possibility of involving Argentines is very small. These are people who are very professional in this kind of financial instrument. Those who are involved are very Be aware of the risks they take - they are volatility traders. This is a private matter between individuals and they are voluntarily involved. I am not promoting LIBRA, I just share LIBRA information. I do this because I am a firm Technological optimist. Any initiative that improves financing for tech entrepreneurs appeals to me. I made no mistakes because I acted in goodwill. But when I saw the consequences, I realized that I still have a lot to learn. I need to understand that after becoming president, I still act like I used to. Unfortunately, this situation made me realize that I need to raise my screening standards and no longer so easy to access.”
Important data
Suspected Galaxy Digital address lost $8.493 million on PNUT, ai16z and arc
According to @ai_9684xtpa monitoring, an address suspected to belong to Galaxy Digital has spent $16.41 million to build positions in the past three months: $PNUT, $ai16z and $arc. However, the address's cumulative floating losses on these three tokens have reached US$8.493 million, and it is not yet certain whether it has participated in market making activities. $PNUT: Holding 21.46 million pieces, the cost of building a position is $0.3743, and the current floating loss is $4.935 million. $ai16z: Holding 7.53 million pieces, the cost of building a position is $0.7446, and the current floating loss is $3.133 million.
According to data disclosed by crypto lawyer wassielawyer, a total of 74,698 traders suffered losses in LIBRA token trading, with a total loss of approximately US$286 million. Specific data shows that there are 25 traders who have lost more than $1 million; there are 2,409 traders who have lost between $10,000 and $50,000; there are 71,369 users who have lost between $0 and $10,000. . Additionally, the average loss per trader is about $3,833.
2018 ETH OG Giant Whale Binance recharges 5,000 ETH, worth US$13.65 million
According to monitoring by on-chain analyst @ai_9684xtpa, in 2018, ETH OG giant whale recharged 5,000 ETH to Binance 20 minutes ago, worth US$13.65 million. This part of ETH may be traced back to 2018: The address continued to hoard ether during the 2018-2020 bear market, and its average cost was as low as $194, and if the sell rate would exceed 1300%
According to Onchain Lens monitoring, six hours ago, the newly created multi-signature wallet of the Trump family's crypto project World Liberty Finance (WLFI) had withdrawn 10 million USDC from Binance and purchased 200 million WLFIs.
According to Lookonchain monitoring, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy exchanged 5 million USDC compensation from the LIBRA team for 27,688 SOLs and deposited 29,657 SOLs (about 5.29 million US dollars) into Kraken.
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