Morning News | The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission announced the regulatory framework for secondary market trading of tokenized investment products; Strategy increased its holdings by 34,164 bitcoins last week; KAIO completed a strategic fi...

整理：ChainCatcher

Important News:

• Aave has seen an outflow of $10.1 billion, total deposits drop to $35.7 billion
• Prediction market Polymarket is negotiating a $400 million financing round, valued at $15 billion
• The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission announces regulatory framework for secondary market trading of tokenized investment products
• Strategy spent $2.54 billion last week to buy 34,164 bitcoins
• Bitmine increased its holdings by 101,627 ETH last week, total holdings rise to approximately 4.976 million
• Tokenization company KAIO completes $8 million strategic financing, led by Tether

What important events have occurred in the past 24 hours?

Tokenization company KAIO completes $8 million strategic financing, led by Tether

According to ChainCatcher, KAIO, a regulated tokenization infrastructure company in Abu Dhabi, announced the completion of $8 million in strategic financing, led by Tether and participated by several crypto and institutional investors, bringing the total financing amount to $19 million. New investors include Systemic Ventures, Further Ventures, and Laser Digital, while existing shareholders like Brevan Howard Digital continue to participate.

KAIO is committed to packaging traditional fund products from institutions like BlackRock, Brevan Howard, and Hamilton Lane onto the blockchain, lowering the entry threshold, with a minimum investment amount of only $100 for qualified users. The company plans to expand its business into credit, structured products, and ETFs, and is collaborating with UAE private equity giant Mubadala Capital, which manages $385 billion in assets, to launch on-chain funds.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that KAIO will bring institutional-grade assets onto the blockchain and achieve broader accessibility, opening new pathways for capital formation and investment. The KAIO platform has embedded a compliance framework that supports regulatory systems in Abu Dhabi, the Cayman Islands, Singapore, and more. Currently, the company manages approximately $100 million in assets and has processed over $500 million in transactions.

Bitmine increased its holdings by 101,627 ETH last week, total holdings rise to approximately 4.976 million

According to ChainCatcher, Bitmine Immersion Technologies, an Ethereum treasury company, disclosed that it increased its holdings by 101,627 ETH last week. The company's crypto asset holdings now include 4,976,485 ETH, 199 BTC, equity in Eightco Holdings valued at $107 million, and shares in Beast Industries valued at $200 million.

Additionally, the total amount of ETH staked by the company is 3,334,637 ETH (calculated at $2,301 per ETH, totaling $7.7 billion).

OKX Star: An additional $25,000 bounty offered to support ZachXBT's investigation into RAVE manipulation case

According to ChainCatcher, OKX founder and CEO Star retweeted on-chain detective ZachXBT's tweet regarding the RAVE market manipulation, stating that OKX's risk engine is operating normally and has not been affected by the fluctuations in the RAVE market. Star announced that OKX will offer an additional $25,000 bounty to support ZachXBT's investigation into the RAVE incident.

It is reported that ZachXBT previously accused RAVE of market manipulation and called for Binance, Bitget, and Gate to jointly investigate, offering a $25,000 reward. As of the time of publication, the price of the RAVE token has fallen below $1, down over 95% from its peak.

Strategy spent $2.54 billion last week to buy 34,164 bitcoins

According to ChainCatcher, official news states that Strategy spent $2.54 billion last week to purchase 34,164 bitcoins at an average price of approximately $74,395.

As of April 19, the company holds a total of 815,061 BTC, with a cumulative purchase cost of approximately $61.56 billion, and an average holding price of approximately $75,527, yielding a 9.5% return on BTC since 2026.

Lido: rsETH risk exposure approximately $21.6 million, will activate $3 million first-loss protection if necessary

According to ChainCatcher, Lido stated on the X platform that its EarnETH treasury has been affected by the theft of 116,500 rsETH (approximately $29.2 million) from the Kelp DAO cross-chain bridge on April 18.

EarnETH holds approximately $21.6 million in rsETH risk exposure through leveraged positions in rsETH/ETH on Aave, accounting for about 9% of the total assets in the treasury. The EarnETH team is currently actively deleveraging to reduce risk, with the outcome depending on the final decisions of Kelp, LayerZero, and Aave regarding loss sharing and bad debt handling.

Lido further stated that EarnETH has a $3 million "first-loss protection mechanism" funded by the Lido DAO treasury, which will be used to cover losses if necessary. Currently, the treasury has suspended redemption processing to assess losses. This incident does not affect stETH and wstETH, and the core staking protocol of Lido is not involved.

Kelp DAO disputes the report on the rsETH bridging attack, blaming LayerZero's default settings for the $290 million loss

According to ChainCatcher, Kelp DAO has disputed the investigation report on the previous $290 million rsETH bridging attack against LayerZero, as reported by CoinDesk.

Kelp DAO claims that the single-validator (1/1) configuration that led to the attack was not a choice made in disregard of recommendations, but rather the default setting in LayerZero's official guidelines, and the validator network (DVN) exploited by the attacker is LayerZero's own infrastructure.

The attack resulted in the theft of 116,500 rsETH, valued at approximately $290 million. Security researchers pointed out that LayerZero's publicly deployed code defaults to single-source validation configuration across networks such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

LayerZero subsequently responded that it will stop signing messages for any applications using single-validator settings and will enforce a security migration.

OCBC Bank in Singapore plans to launch physical gold fund tokens on Ethereum and Solana chains
According to ChainCatcher, Singapore's OCBC Bank and its asset management division Lion Global Investors have disclosed plans to issue physical gold fund tokens, GOLDX Token, on the Ethereum and Solana chains. OCBC Bank will support the token issuance architecture design, while Lion Global Investors will provide the investment framework and governance structure for the underlying fund.
The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission announces regulatory framework for secondary market trading of tokenized investment products
According to ChainCatcher, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission has announced a new regulatory framework that allows tokenized investment products approved by the commission to be traded in the secondary market, aiming to promote the development of digital asset trading activities in Hong Kong.

The new guidelines primarily facilitate the secondary market trading of tokenized open-end funds on licensed virtual asset trading platforms and will consider allowing over-the-counter trading arrangements on a case-by-case basis. As of March 2026, there have been 13 tokenized products offered to the public in Hong Kong, with the total asset value of tokenized equity categories increasing to approximately 10.7 billion. The first batch of products is expected to mainly consist of tokenized money market funds. The new measures cover fair pricing, orderly trading, liquidity provision, and information disclosure.
Fu Peng joins Hong Kong-listed company New Fire Group as Chief Economist
According to ChainCatcher, Fu Peng, former chief economist of Northeast Securities, has officially joined Hong Kong-listed company New Fire Group as Chief Economist. New Fire Group has confirmed this news.
Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum does not pursue speed but aims to be the safest chain, achieving ZKVM dominant verification by 2028
According to ChainCatcher's on-site report, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival. He defined Ethereum with two core functions: a public bulletin board for applications to publish messages and data; and shared digital objects controlled by code, covering assets, NFTs, ENS, and DAOs. He emphasized that Ethereum's goal is not to compete with high-frequency trading platforms on speed, but to become the safest, most decentralized, and always online trusted chain.

In terms of the short-term roadmap, he introduced the account abstraction proposal EIP-8141, which natively supports smart contract wallets, quantum-resistant signature algorithms, and privacy protocols; regarding quantum resistance, there are currently two signature schemes based on hash and lattice, and the team is significantly improving their efficiency through EVM vectorization.

He revealed that ZKVM is fast enough to prove real-time EVM execution, with this year's goal being to ensure its security, planning to start deployment from a small proportion of the network, aiming to become the main method of verification chain by 2028, significantly scaling Ethereum without sacrificing decentralization. In terms of long-term vision, Ethereum is actively utilizing AI to generate mathematical proofs to formalize the verification of software security and pursuing complete quantum safety and maximum simplicity to ensure platform security does not rely on the continuous existence of any single team.

Fan Wenzhong, Executive Director of the Chinese Financial Society: We are at a moment of transition from money shops to modern banking, and the decentralized agent economy will reshape the future

According to ChainCatcher's on-site report, Fan Wenzhong, Executive Director of the Chinese Financial Society and former chairman of Beijing Financial Holdings Group, delivered a keynote speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival. He pointed out that we are currently at a historical turning point similar to the transition from money shops to modern banking, where AI is the advanced productive force of the physical world, and Web3 is a new type of production relationship in the digital world. The integration of the two will give rise to a decentralized agent economy (DAE).

He analyzed that AI Agents have execution capabilities but lack independent identity, accounts, and trust mechanisms, while Web3 solves these pain points through smart contracts, on-chain identities, and programmable currencies; conversely, AI Agents significantly lower the usage threshold of Web3. He proposed that DAE has four main characteristics: agent sovereignty and 24/7 operation, high-frequency atomic exchanges, collaboration mechanisms based on technological trust rather than moral law, and organizational evolution from companies to DAOs to decentralized AI companies (DACs).

He warned that this transformation will impact the labor market, with white-collar workers being replaced before blue-collar workers, as AI quantitative funds have achieved returns far exceeding those of retail investors, suggesting that the government should proactively advance social security reforms. Finally, he recommended that Hong Kong develop a controllable high-performance public chain, pilot limited digital persona registrations, introduce Web3+AI composite talents, establish a digital finance industry fund, and promote collaborative innovation between the Hong Kong dollar stablecoin and digital RMB.

Aave has seen an outflow of $10.1 billion, total deposits drop to $35.7 billion
According to ChainCatcher, on-chain analyst Yu Jin monitored that Aave has seen continuous outflows of funds since the incident early yesterday morning, totaling $10.1 billion, reducing total deposits from $45.8 billion to $35.7 billion, of which $4.5 billion is stablecoins. This outflow caused the stablecoin deposit interest rate on Aave to maintain a 13.4% APY for a whole day.
EasyDNS admits responsibility for the eth.limo hijacking incident, marking its first social engineering attack in 28 years
According to ChainCatcher, The Block reported that the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) gateway eth.limo was subjected to a DNS hijacking attack last Friday night. The project released a post-incident analysis report on Saturday, tracing the attack back to a social engineering attack against the domain registrar EasyDNS.

eth.limo stated that DNSSEC verification rejected the attacker's domain server changes, and no actual impact on users has been found. In response to the recent multiple breaches at the DNS layer in the crypto front, eth.limo plans to migrate to a stricter security service under EasyDNS, which will no longer support account recovery features.

EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic has publicly acknowledged this vulnerability, stating that this is the first successful social engineering attack against customers in its 28-year history.

Prediction market Polymarket is negotiating a $400 million financing round, valued at $15 billion

According to ChainCatcher, The Information cited informed sources reporting that the prediction market platform Polymarket is negotiating with investors for a financing round, aiming to raise $400 million at a valuation of approximately $15 billion (including new funds).

This financing will be added to the $600 million financing round that Intercontinental Exchange (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) invested in last month, which did not disclose its valuation at that time. Polymarket is seeking to add more strategic investors beyond Intercontinental Exchange.

Meme Popularity Rankings

According to meme token tracking and analysis platform GMGN, as of April 21, 09:00,

The top five popular tokens on ETH in the past 24 hours are: LINK, PEPE, UNI, Mog, SPX

The top five popular tokens on Solana in the past 24 hours are: TROLL, swarms, Punch, neet, LOL

The top five popular tokens on Base in the past 24 hours are: SKITTEN, PEPE, BASED, B3, SCAN

What are some noteworthy articles to read in the past 24 hours?

L1 is dead, Appchain should rise

Since the era of "Rollup as a Service" (RaaS), the outcome has been predetermined. This is a sign that the execution layer is falling into a death spiral and commoditization.

What I mean is that general L1 tokens will continue to trend towards zero, and likely without exception. I will try to explain why, and how I would pivot if I were an L1 operator.

The main drivers of L1 failure are as follows: linear token release, failed value propositions, poor management, and the industry's "leadership."

I will briefly elaborate on these points—these are just personal opinions and not conclusions.

Vitalik's full speech at the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival: We do not compete on speed, security and decentralization are core

On April 20, at the highly anticipated opening ceremony of the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech, deeply analyzing Ethereum's ultimate vision as a "world computer" and the hardcore roadmap for the next five years.

Why is this VC firm still growing 150% while leading crypto VCs are shrinking?

As the crypto market overall declines, nearly all crypto VCs are seeing their assets under management shrink, and the industry is entering a brutal clearing cycle. However, against this backdrop, a crypto venture capital fund established less than five years ago has become a complete exception, emerging with an independent growth curve amid the contraction.

According to a batch of undisclosed financial disclosure documents from the SEC obtained by a Fortune reporter last week, the data shows that leading firms like Paradigm, Pantera, a16z crypto, and Multicoin have all seen their assets under management (AUM) shrink across the board in 2025, with Multicoin shrinking by more than half.

The only firm that has grown against the trend is Haun Ventures, a venture capital fund established only four years ago, which has seen its assets under management grow from an initial $1 billion to $2.5 billion by 2025.

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