Interchain News #2

Another thrilling week in the Interchain has wrapped up, with lots of exciting announcements, fresh airdrops, product launches, fundraising events, token mergers, chain upgrades, and so much more.

Let's right jump into it!

Celestia raises $100M

Almost one year after the Celestia Mainnet launch in October 2023, the Celestia Foundation has raised $100M at an evaluation of $3.5B.

- Lead by Bain Capital Ventures, with participations of Syncracy Capital, Robot Ventures & Placeholder.
- Increasing the total amount raised to $155M.
- On the path to 1GB blocks, Celestia is tracking to deliver the capacity of many networks in parallel.

SAGA Airdrop is live 🪂

The fifth round of the Saga "Power Level Over 9000" airdrop campaign is live.

- Top 20K $SAGA stakers are eligible.
- Loyalty Bonus for folks that staked 100% of vault 4.
- + Merch Drop, Ambassador Drop, Meme Contest Winner Drop.
- Claim window closes in about 24h!

Babylon is increasing BTC staking cap

- Babylon Mainnet Phase-1, Cap-2 will go live in the second week of October.
- Increasing the staking cap from 1K to 20K BTC.
- Cap 1 batch was filled in 6 blocks; Be ready!

CUDOS has joined the ASI Alliance

The vote to merge Cudos with Artificial Intelligence Alliance has successfully passed, making Cudos the fourth member to join the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance.

The ASI Alliance is now composed of 4 projects:

Fetch, SingularityNet, Ocean Protocol and Cudos.

Initia Fundraising

Last week, Initia announced their Series A fundraiser along with a Community Funding Round.

- $14M raised at a valuation of $350M FDV.
- Led by Theory VC and participation from Delphi Venture and Hack VC.
- Total funding after three fundraising rounds: $22.5M.
- Only 15% of the total supply went to VCs.
- Locked tokens will NOT be stake-able on Initia.

▶️ Community Round:

- Allowing everyday people to get in at a better valuation than VCs.
- Max ticket size: $5000 selling 1% of the total supply.
- Over 800 participants, sold out in less than two hours.
- $2.5M raised at a valuation of $250M FDV (28.5% discount).

Osmosis v26 Software Upgrade 🧪

Taker Fee Revenue Share Mechanism: Allows for taker fee agreements to be made by governance. Establishing mutually beneficial ways to generate protocol revenue. Like the revenue share agreement between Nomic and Osmosis.

SDK upgrade to v0.50 + CometBFT upgrade to v0.38: Ledger 1-Click trading will finally go live with this upgrade.

THORChain Burn Mechanism 🔥

ThorChain has implemented a new burn mechanism into the network logic.

- 1 basis point (BPs) of ecosystem income will now be burnt!
- Right now, THORChain has a daily swap volume of ~$100M.
- A 1BP cut, accounts for $10K worth of $RUNE burnt daily.

Good Tech never dies! ⚛️

Individual Cosmos chains might struggle, fade into irrelevance and some might even die. However the best in class tech stack for building fully sovereign and interoperable chains prevails and continues to flourish.

- SEI, TIA, INJ, FET, AKT, SAGA are all built on Cosmos tech.
- Those are among the best performing tokens this cycle.
- And the next generation of Cosmos chains is already underway with Berachain, Babylon, Allora, Nillion, Initia, Namada and many more.

Olympus Rises

Olympus is the latest release of the Cosmos SDK (v0.52), introducing new features, improvements and performance enhancements to the Cosmos SDK.

- Separation of Core Components: seperation of the staking, governance, and distribution module.
- Protocol Pool: Dev and community funding to be managed natively within the SDK.
- Governance overhaul: Introduction of new proposal types.
- Consensus Key Rotation & Accounts Module.

Llama 3.2 is live on Akash Chat

Only a few hours after the releas of Llama 3.2, Akash implemented Meta's latest AI module into Akash Chat, a fully open-source, decentralized and permissionless AI-powered chatbot.

- 165 tokens per second.
- Powered by NVIDIA A100s on Akash Network.
- Totally free with no sign-in required.

EVM Swaps are live on Skip:Go

- Bi-directional Swaps: Move any asset between EVM and Cosmos chains effortlessly.
- Fast & Competitive: Lightning-fast and great prices.
- Wide Chain Support: Ethereum, Polygon, OP, ARB, BASE, and many more.

Phantom integration on dYdX

Phantom wallet users can now trade perps on dYdX chain.

dYdX is sunsetting v3

- On October 28th, dYdX v3 (on Staknet - ETH) will be sunset.
- Users of dYdX v4 (dYdX chain) will be unaffected.
- Channeling all the focus on v4 and the launch of dYdX Unlimited, going live this fall.

Levana Predict is live on Neutron 🐲

Folks can now bet on the outcome of the US election on Levana.

Have your say on whether Trump or Harris will win the 2024 US Presidential Elections and benefit by bidding on the right outcome.

Upcoming Mainnet Launches

- Initia Mainnet
- Eclipse Mainnet
- Union Mainnet
- Mantra Mainnet

Amulet Finance is live on Mainnet

- Amulet is a DeFi lending protocol built on Neutron.
- Introducing self-repaying loans on staked assets (dATOM, stATOM).
- It enables users to borrow against their staked assets, with the loan repaying itself through the accrued staking rewards.

MARS Token Migration 🛰️

Old $MARS tokens can now be migrated to the new MARS TokenFactory standard token on the Osmosis transmuter pool.

- Users have 4 months to migrate & transmute their tokens.
- Thereafter, the Mars Hub chain will be deprecated.
- Any remaining liquidity on Mars chain or in the Osmosis transmuter pool will be burned.

More NFTs on Fractal.fun

3 new NFT collection were added to Fractal.fun that can now be fractionalized and turned into fungible tokens, unlocking new NFT-Fi opportunities.

- Pixel Wizard & Pixel Witches 🧙‍♂️
- Rekt Bulls 🐂

That's it for today, thanks for reading folks.

We hope this article helped you stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the Interchain.

#InterChainNews2

Disclaimer

This article is intended to educate readers about certain topics and should not be considered financial advice in any way.