"Weekly Editor's Picks" is a "functional" column of Odaily Planet Daily. Based on the extensive coverage of real-time information each week, the Planet Daily also publishes many high-quality in-depth analysis articles, but they may be hidden among the information flow and trending news, passing you by.
Therefore, our editorial team will select some quality articles worth spending time reading and saving from the content published in the past seven days every Saturday, providing you with new insights from the perspectives of data analysis, industry judgment, and opinion output, as you navigate the crypto world.
Now, let's read together:
Investment and Entrepreneurship
Funding becomes increasingly difficult, crypto venture capital enters the final stage of frenzy
In 2022, the amount of crypto venture capital reached $23 billion; by 2024, this figure dropped to $6 billion. Many large exits in the crypto industry come from token listings, but when most token listings show a negative trend, investor exits become challenging.
Funding difficulties have led to capital concentration in a few large companies. In the future, raising venture capital will become even more difficult, and the strategy of hastily issuing tokens and hoping people will buy them on exchanges is no longer viable.
The history of VC asset bubbles: Why does every new coin seem destined to go to zero?
In recent years, venture capital funds have performed poorly, and VC institutions are turning to short-term sell-offs to return capital to LPs. Many well-known crypto VC firms may not survive in the coming years.
The incentive mechanisms and timelines of VCs are misaligned with the goals of founders, driving a shift in the following trends: community-driven funding (projects are more inclined to raise funds through community efforts rather than relying on VCs), and long-term supportive liquidity (liquid funds are gradually becoming the mainstay for long-term support of tokens compared to VCs).
From the total on-chain holdings, major players with large capital 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 centralized exchange order books, providing market liquidity in a more neutral manner without dominating coin prices. The strategies and technologies they provide are also relatively standard.
Active market makers, however, face significant compliance risks, so most remain anonymous. Some active market makers may disguise themselves as investment institutions, incubators, etc.
Market makers may not be the root cause, but they are indeed the main tools for implementing operations. As service providers, market makers are often just guns, tools. The demands of exchanges and project teams are the starting point. During bull markets, the entire system jointly creates massive profits, allowing all parties to maintain at least a minimum level of goodwill. However, in bear markets, this entire chain accelerates the outbreak of liquidity crises, leading to a repeat of face-tearing and mutual accusations.
The current predicament of the crypto market is not entirely caused by market makers. Although they are direct creators of "false prosperity," the entire complete interest chain also includes project teams, VCs, KOLs, and yield farming studios.
Dragonfly partner: How I missed the opportunity to invest in Solana's seed round
"I turned down the opportunity to participate in the @solana seed round investment at $0.04 in early 2018. At the current price, that would mean missing out on a 3250x return. Solana was one of the first projects I evaluated as a junior VC. Back then, I was adorably naive and confident, writing memos for every project I passed on. Re-reading that memo now is just peak junior VC cringe. At that time, we were all obsessed with finding the Ethereum killer, studying consensus protocols, and what technology would replace EVM/eWASM."
Haseeb also attached the completely unedited original memo (the worst investment MISS of his career).
Solana co-founder Toly later replied: "All your concerns back then were indeed reasonable. Essentially, it was a bet—betting on whether we could solve these issues while maintaining the underlying advantages that other teams did not have." Haseeb then replied to Toly: "I think that's the lesson here. Your dedication to underlying optimization and unique attack angles is something other teams lack. Maximizing strengths while minimizing weaknesses is the most important. I was completely unaware of this at the time."
Interview with Eugene: The golden rules of top traders
Believe in the power of heavy positions, avoid emotional trading, learn to cut losses and take profits in a timely manner…
Also recommended: 《Overseas A8 Big shots share trading experiences: Be brave in taking profits and losses, slow is fast, recognize the true god BTC》《The "ever-profitable" code: A guide to perpetual contract arbitrage》《The pain of returning to long-termism leads to pricing strategies becoming a double-edged sword》。
Airdrop Opportunities and Interaction Guide
Overview of 6 popular testnet interactions in 2025 (with detailed tutorials)
Lens Protocol, Towns, Grass Network, Plasma, Chaos Labs, Monad.
Also recommended: 《Airdrop Weekly | Babylon airdrop registration deadline extended to March 19; Bedrock open for airdrop queries (3.10-3.16)》《This week's selected interaction projects: Dapp Portal gaming, GRVT trading volume, Halliday early bird applications》。
Meme
Mastering BNB Chain: Strategies and tools for hunting coins
"Zhao Changpeng, He Yi narrative capture" toolset: Twitter pop-ups, DeBot, chain.fm;
"KOL signal enhancement strategy" toolset: GMGN KOL/VC monitoring, DeBot AI signals, chain.fm KOL channel;
"Data-driven sniping" toolset: GMGN, chain.fm, DeBot, ave.ai;
"Address monitoring following" toolset: GMGN, chain.fm, DeBot, ave.ai.
Ethereum and Scalability
Can the gas-free offerings from various parties retain users?
In just 30 days, 89 projects across 9 blockchains completed over 2 million gas-free transactions, saving up to $117,000 in gas fees.
This wave of gas-free transactions indicates that solutions like the Paymaster in ERC-4337 smart wallets can rapidly boost on-chain activity by paying fees for users, but the real test lies in users' repeated participation.
Multi-Ecosystem and Cross-Chain
By analyzing the complete steps from transaction creation to final state update—including creation and initiation, broadcasting, ordering, execution, and state update—one can clearly grasp the design philosophy and technical trade-offs of public chains.
Aptos: optimistic parallelism and high-performance design; Ethereum: the 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 side does not need to submit transaction declarations before execution. If a conflict is found during validation after execution, Block-STM will re-execute the affected transactions to ensure consistency. However, in practice, if transaction dependencies are not confirmed in advance for conflicts, a large number of errors may occur during actual execution, causing public chain operations to stall. Therefore, optimistic parallelism does not simply assume that transactions are conflict-free; it avoids risks at a certain stage, which is the transaction broadcasting stage.
Node malfeasance "cutting users"? Why has Solana become a hotspot for MEV?
"Being sandwiched" refers to sandwich attacks, a common MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) strategy, and a prevalent issue in AMM markets.
MEV on Solana was initially inconspicuous until Jito launched the MEV reward protocol, which brought it to the forefront. Now, over 66% of validators have adopted the Jito-Solana client, allowing users to pay "tips" to prioritize their transactions, while Jito also runs a mempool, which has enabled sandwich attackers to listen in on user transactions. Although Jito closed the mempool in March 2024 in an attempt to reduce such attacks, MEV bots can still continue to listen to transactions by running RPC nodes, and the attacks have not ceased.
Solana is fast but centralized, and attackers exploit loopholes using private nodes, which the Jito system cannot stop. In contrast, Ethereum relies on fee competition and MEV-Boost, along with a decentralized structure, providing better safeguards. For Solana to solve its issues, it needs to optimize its mechanisms and decentralize power.
For P newcomers, the primary principle when rushing into low-quality tokens on-chain is to avoid setting slippage too high. It is recommended to rationally set a reasonable slippage range of 0.5% - 1% based on market volatility. If using AMM for trading, one should actively enable MEV protection features. This mechanism can significantly reduce the likelihood of transactions being monitored and subjected to sandwich attacks by malicious nodes through techniques such as obfuscating transaction paths and delaying broadcasts.
BSC ecosystem heats up: Overview of 7 popular Memes and 5 unlaunched projects
Arab concept Memes: $mubarak, $Mubarakah, $QMubarak;
Community concept Memes: $BNB Card, $DDDD, $TUT, $Palu;
Representatives of funded but unlaunched projects include APRO, Astherus, KiloEx, LoopCrypto, Sign Protocol.
DeFi
Web3 & AI
Is the continuous decline of AI Agents caused by the recently popular MCP protocol?
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standardized protocol designed to seamlessly connect various AI LLM/Agents to different data sources and tools, akin to a plug-and-play USB "universal" interface, replacing the previous end-to-end "specific" packaging method. Manus + MCP has severely impacted Web3 AI Agents. Many web3 AI Agent frameworks and services only address the rapid development and application needs similar to web2 AI Agents, but they cannot keep up with the innovation speed of web2 in terms of technical services, standards, and differentiated advantages, leading to a revaluation and repricing of the previous batch of web3 AI Agents by the market/capital.
Web3 AI Agents, in addition to the quick deployment + multi-Agent collaboration communication framework from web2 + Tokenomic narrative, have many web3 Native innovative directions worth exploring: for example, equipping a distributed consensus collaboration framework, considering the characteristics of LLM large model off-chain computation + on-chain state storage, which requires many adaptable components.
The key focus for truly conquering web3 AI Agents should be on how to align the "complex workflows" of AI Agents with the "trust verification flows" of blockchains as closely as possible.
Weekly Hotspot Review
In the past week, regarding policies and macro markets, the SEC clarified that PoW mining does not constitute a securities issuance (analysis); Trump stated that stablecoins will help expand the dominance of the dollar and called for congressional legislation; Bowman will serve as the new Vice Chair of Supervision at the Federal Reserve; Telegram founder Pavel Durov has been allowed to leave France and is returning to Dubai;
In terms of opinions and statements, Trump spoke at the DAS summit, stating: he will not be as foolish as Biden to sell government holdings at prices far below long-term value (full text); CryptoQuant CEO: the Bitcoin bull market cycle has ended; Arthur Hayes: BTC may have bottomed out, but US stocks may still have downside potential; Matrixport: 90,000 dollars may be a key price indicator for judging BTC's future direction; Dragonfly partner: Recently communicated with the Ethereum Foundation, now bullish on ETH; Trader Eugene: has attempted to buy small positions in AI-related tokens, believing they have been oversold and are naturally bottoming out; CZ: buying TST and Mubarak for some testing over the weekend; CZ: the voting mechanism for listing coins has shown good initial results, but long-term development will tear the community apart and lead to mutual attacks; CZ: has been waiting for the AI hype to subside before starting to promote BNB AI; A whale on Hyperliquid with 50x leverage renamed their account to MELANIA on DeBank and verified their official X account, while crypto KOL's “whale hunting operation” failed, ZachXBT called it gambling behavior by cybercriminals, exposing their true identity;
Regarding institutions, large companies, and leading projects, Trump Media executives established a SPAC company, planning to raise $179 million to acquire crypto and defense-related companies; a Japanese listed company Metaplanet appointed Trump’s son Eric Trump as a member of the strategic advisory committee; Binance launched Binance Alpha 2.0, integrating CEX and DEX trading; He Yi: anti-sandwich is now live on BNB, and those severely sandwiched within 24 hours can apply for compensation; Binance launched the first phase of voting for new coins and the first batch of voting for delisting coins; OKX suspended DEX aggregator trading services; Aave plans to issue a new coin, causing controversy; CRO staged the most absurd governance farce in history; EOS announced it will rebrand as Vaulta, transitioning to Web3 banking services;
In terms of Memes, CZ concept coin Mubarak and others surged, driving Middle Eastern-themed Memes on the BNB Chain;
In terms of data, the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group reportedly holds about 13,562 BTC; on March 16, pump.fun protocol revenue hit a new low in four months;
In terms of security, the Berachain ecosystem social trading platform Berally appears to have been attacked, and the official team advises users to temporarily revoke dApp and Staking permissions; Kaito AI X account was hacked, and the official personnel clarified that no wallets were stolen; the gaming platform Wemix suffered a hacker attack in February, losing $6.22 million, with the CEO admitting to delayed notifications but denying any intent to conceal; Four.Meme attackers profited by manipulating transaction order and liquidity pool status, and Four.Meme has since restored Launch functionality and initiated compensation; AIXBT was suspected of phishing for 55.5 ETH; Watcher.Guru X account was hacked… well, it has been another eventful week.
Attached is the portal for the "Weekly Editor's Picks" series.
See you next time~
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