Telegram founder suddenly arrested. What about founders of other top crypto projects?

Author: WOO Network

Background

On August 25, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested by French police after landing at Le Bourget Airport in northern Paris. He was accused of failing to control Telegram and allowing illegal activities such as terrorism, money laundering and drug trafficking to spread. He may be imprisoned for up to 20 years. (Note: Pavel Durov is currently on bail, but his exit is restricted)

TON tokens fell from 6.8 to 5.4 in 3 hours, a sharp drop of 20%.

With the arrest of Pavel Durov, memes about the current situation of the top ten cryptocurrency founders began to circulate on the community. The founder of Bitcoin disappeared, the founder of Ethereum was busy dating, and Binance's CZ was in jail, etc.

In this article, WOO X Research will review the founders of the top token projects, the current status of the product ecosystem, and the future potential.

Bitcoin

Founder Status: The most well-known point about Bitcoin is that no one knows who the founder Satoshi Nakamoto is. Not only is his gender, nationality, and age unknown, but it has also not been confirmed whether Satoshi Nakamoto is a person or a team.

In the past few years, many people have rushed to the media to claim that they are Satoshi Nakamoto himself. The most famous one is Craig Wright, who is often nicknamed Australian Satoshi because he is Australian.

In 2016, he publicly declared that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, and he continued to claim this identity when attending any event. The outside world was skeptical and believed that he was a liar. Until March this year, the British High Court ruled that Craig Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto, believing that he had "seriously abused judicial procedures" in multiple legal proceedings and had "large-scale forgery" in the process of trying to prove his identity.

But on August 13, well-known technology entrepreneur and investigative reporter Dave Troy said on Twitter that he had recently asked the FBI to investigate the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. The FBI responded: "Satoshi Nakamoto may be one or more third-party individuals", which means that it does not deny but also does not admit the existence of Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto is still the biggest mystery in the history of blockchain.

The current market hotspots revolve around Fractal Bitcoin and Babylon Bitcoin staking. The former is BTC L2, developed by Unisat and Block Space Force, and aims to solve the expansion problem of the Bitcoin network. The test network will be launched soon, and users can get water from the official tap or use the test network to mine. It is expected to be launched on the main network in September. Babylon is an L1, where users can stake BTC to earn income, and the source of income comes from Babylon entrusting these staked bitcoins as pledged assets to other POS chains that require additional security. The first phase of staking was launched on August 23, with a limit of 1,000 BTC. It was filled up in just 10 minutes, and the Gas Fee was as high as 1555 Sats, about 200-300 U, and many protocols such as Solv, Lorenzo, PumpBTC and Bedrock participated in it, accounting for nearly 75% of the pledge amount. While Babylon is liberating Bitcoin liquidity, another battle for liquidity protocols is quietly unfolding.

Future potential: Bitcoin has always been regarded as a tool for storing value. It was not until the emergence of inscriptions that crypto users rethink the possibility of building a Bitcoin ecosystem. At present, there are many schools of thought in the Bitcoin-related ecology, which is still in its infancy. Many ways to participate in the protocol are to provide their own BTC as collateral assets, and the protocol will then use it to earn profits elsewhere and share profits with the pledgers. Therefore, the focus should be on the protocol's capital volume and external ecological connections.

Ethereum

Founder status: Vitalik has been quite active on Twitter recently. He first posted a meme picture of "Ethereum is good" on August 21, and wrote in the text: "Someone told me to do less philosophical thinking and more publicity for Ethereum." But it seems that it did not have much effect on the price of Ethereum. Instead, it stimulated the on-chain meme coin EBULL to soar, and its market value once reached 27 million US dollars.

In addition, he also commented on the arrest of Pavel Durov on warpcast: "I saw zero non-Westerners defending the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, but quite a few Westerners. I definitely don't want to say they don't exist (after all, my timeline is as biased as anyone's), it's just that this is the sample I have so far, and this is another example of the decoupling of liberalism and Westernism that Bruno Maçães often talks about."

He did not take sides on the matter, but rather expressed his opinions from the perspective of social observation.

Current status of Ethereum: Due to the high uncertainty of the recent market environment and the impact of Grayscale's ETH ETF selling coins, the price trend of Ethereum is much weaker than that of Bitcoin, and on-chain activities have also decreased. The average Gas Fee in the past seven days is about 1~2 Gwei, which has also affected the inflation of Ethereum. In the past 30 days, the market has added 62,880 Ethereum, and the annual inflation rate is 0.637%.

Future potential: Vitalik transferred 200 ETH to the Kraken exchange and the multi-signature wallet on August 15 and August 27 respectively. The community also teased that Vitalik was withdrawing money to fall in love. In addition, the Ethereum Foundation also transferred 35,000 ETH to the Karken exchange on August 24. The previous large transfer by the Ethereum Foundation was on May 6, 2023, when 15,000 Ethereum was transferred to Kraken.

The figure below shows the Ethereum Foundation's sale of Ethereum this year. It can be seen that it has sold at staged highs many times, and the selling pressure of 35,000 this time is also the highest so far this year.

Not only did the Ethereum Foundation dump the market, but in early August this year, many market makers sold Ethereum, including GSR, Amber Group, Flow Traders and Jump Crypto. Under the huge selling pressure from many parties, we still need to be cautious about the market outlook.

Reference: https://x.com/spotonchain/status/1827057564691132682/photo/2

Solana

Founder status: Solana founder Toly can be found on Twitter, actively promoting Solana ecosystem projects & technologies, including Blinks, which brings Web 3 applications to the Web 2 interface, and Solana's cooperation with Robinhood wallet.

Solana Current Situation: In addition to the most well-known Pump Fun and meme coins, the reason for Solana's rise this time is actually Paypal's stablecoin PYUSD, Solana accounts for more than 80% of the market share, surpassing Ethereum. PayPal chose to expand PYUSD to Solana because of its excellent settlement speed, transaction fees of less than one cent, and an ecosystem with more than 2,500 developers.

PYUSD has more than 45% of its supply deployed to the leading lending protocol Kamino, and the current deposit rate is 13%.

Solana's future potential: In addition to the memes and large institutional stablecoins (PYUSD) mentioned above, what other stories does Solana have? Solana Restaking Protocol Solayer may be a potential narrative.

Strictly speaking, Solayer is not like traditional Restaking. Solayer coordinates the block space and transaction order in the project.

Imagine Solana as a highway with multiple lanes. These lanes are like different staking levels. The more left the lane is, the faster it travels, but the higher the toll is; the more right the lane is, the slower it travels, but the toll is cheaper. These lanes are different validators on the blockchain.

The cars driving on this highway are like various applications that want to use Solana. Each application has different needs. Some need faster speeds, so they will choose faster lanes, while others can accept slower lanes.

And Solayer is like the manager of this highway. It is responsible for coordinating lanes, cars, and toll booths to ensure that everything runs smoothly. These toll booths represent "restakers" who put their funds in different lanes to help applications use the highway better and get some rewards for doing so.

"Restaking" means that these stake holders not only protect the entire highway (Solana), but also spread their stakes across different systems to make the applications on the entire highway run smoother and safer. By doing this, they not only improve the efficiency of the highway, but also get more rewards.

Currently, Solayer's latest round of financing is a seed round, with $12 million raised and a valuation (FDV) of $80 million. It was led by Polychain, and other investors include Binance Labs, Hack VC, Nomad Capital, ABCDE Capital, Maelstrom Capital, Bitscale Capital, Borderless Capital, Wormhole, Big Brain Holdings, Race Capital, Finality Capital Partners, Lvna Capital, and Road Capital.

Binance

Founder status: On April 30, in the U.S. Seattle Federal Court, Binance founder and former CEO CZ officially accepted the verdict and was sentenced to 4 months in prison for violating anti-money laundering laws. BNB price fell 10% in two days.

If CZ was immediately imprisoned on April 30, he would be released on August 30. However, CZ had not entered the detention center until May 16, so it is unlikely that he would be released on August 30. The more likely release date is the end of September. At that time, in addition to BNB itself, the currencies with high probability of speculation include HOOK, ID, EDU and AI, which are strongly related to Binance.

BNB Current Situation: Recently, BNB Chain ushered in a new director of ecosystem development, strongly promoting the upcoming meme craze on BNB Chain. Its Web 3 Wallet added a tab of Four.meme to facilitate users to play local dogs on their mobile phones. Many small and medium-sized KOLs received private messages from BNB Chain, inviting them to participate in the meme competition. It can be seen that BNB currently focuses on the meme competition on the chain.

BNB’s future potential: As mentioned above, BNB Chain is committed to developing memes. The current currency is represented by CAT, whose full name is Simon’s Cat. The concept is a Youtube animation in the UK in 2008. The number of subscribers is as high as 6.27 million. This token is different from other meme coins that are based on the concept. CAT is an officially recognized meme coin.

CAT is also closely connected with the old meme project FLOKI. On August 20, FLOKI announced that Launchpad launched CAT tokens, raising a total of US$4.25 million, and announced that FLOKI holders can receive CAT airdrops.

The current market value of CAT is about US$170 million, and the historical high is US$220 million.

BNB Chain currently wants to build its own meme ecosystem. The top priority is to identify the meme leader on the chain in order to drive the development of the overall ecosystem. CAT is riding on this hope. In addition, CZ is about to be released from prison and return, and has the opportunity to become a meme currency listed on Binance.