According to news on March 10, the Ethereum Kaustinen testnet is now online again. This is the PoS verkle testnet, replacing the Condrieu testnet, this time using block proofs that comply with the new consensus specification.

Kaustinen, a city in Finland with the same postal code as Condrieu, replaces the Condrieu testnet, Guillaume Ballet, core developer of Go-ethereum at the Ethereum Foundation, said on Jan. 27 that the new PoS verkle testnet includes block proofs.

The future of finance will be without banks, according to a report by Bernstein on Friday. Banks will still exist, but in the background act as “custodians of old wealth”. According to analysts Gautam Chhugani and Manas Agrawal, “new wealth creation and innovation in financial services will migrate to new financial applications on the Ethereum ecosystem”.

Decentralized finance is enjoying a renaissance with “more sustainable, scalable, transparent, and improved token economics,” the report said. Bernstein estimates that by 2028, unbanked DeFi revenues will reach $40 billion, and total assets will grow from about $65 billion today to $1 trillion.

Due to rapid adoption, it predicts assets will reach $5 trillion in the next decade. The next generation of DeFi will be built on a scalable layer 2, transaction costs will be reduced by 95%, and products will generate real income and sustainable benefits, rather than being driven by token incentives.

On March 9th, the Ethereum Foundation announced in a blog post that the Shapella network upgrade will be activated on the Goerli network at epoch 162304. This is expected to be the last testnet upgrade before the Shapella upgrade is scheduled for the Ethereum mainnet.

Prior to the news on February 28, the Ethereum Sepolia test network has successfully simulated the Shanghai upgrade. According to the report on March 2, after the Goerli testnet upgrade, the mainnet upgrade will be carried out in the next 3 to 4 weeks.

Ethereum scaling project Scroll has announced it has raised $50 million in a new funding round.

Investors in this round include Polychain Capital, Sequoia China, Bain Capital Crypto, Moore Capital Management, OKX Ventures, Variant Fund, Newman Capital, IOSG Ventures, and Qiming Venture Partners.

The round values Scroll at $1.8 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Scroll had previously raised $33 million over two funding rounds at an undisclosed valuation. The new funding round brings Scroll’s total funding to date to $83 million.

DeFillama data shows that in the past 7 days, the stablecoin funds flowing into Ethereum L2 exceeded 2 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of more than 5%.

In terms of Arbitrum, the total inflow of stablecoins on the network in February was about 300 million US dollars, and the average daily inflow exceeded 10 million US dollars. USDC accounted for 67% of the total value of all stablecoins on the Arbitrum chain with 968.63 million US dollars. Tether and DAI The total value is about 394.81 million US dollars. In addition, the Arbitrum network transaction volume reached 690,000 in February, setting a record high.

In terms of Optimism, since the beginning of March, the inflow of network stablecoins reached 669.11 million US dollars, an increase of 4.89%. USDC accounted for 67% of the total value of all stablecoins on the Optimism chain with 364.56 million US dollars. The total value of sUSD and USDT is about 145.77 million Dollar.

Chainlink issued a statement stating that the Sepolia testnet is now Chainlink’s main Ethereum testnet, and its core services such as price feeds, VRF, automation, and functions are already running on the network.

Developers can access Sepolia ETH and LINK using a Chainlink faucet.

Lookonchain tweeted that an organization has accumulated 7,669 ETH ($12 million), 83,815 AAVE ($6.37 million), 919,998 UNI ($5.74 million), and 86,976 COMP ($4 million) this year. The institution earned $36 million in 2022 by buying ETH at the bottom and selling at the top.

During the period from June 24 to August 1, 2022, the institution received 95,138 ETH (valued at $118 million at the time) from Binance, with an average receiving price of $1,237; and on August 15, September 14, 2022 Rihe transferred 95,100 ETH (valued at $154 million at the time) to Binance on September 15.

In addition, the agency received 86,976 COMP from Binance on January 4 and today, with an average price of $39; it received 83,815 AAVE from Binance on January 4 and January 7, with an average price of $57 USD; 919,999 UNIs were received from Binance today, with an average receiving price of $6.2; 7,669 ETHs were received from Binance on January 4 and February 22, with an average receiving price of $1,492.

According to Lookonchain, the institution is related to IOSG Ventures because they use the same Binance deposit address.

Report: 60% of pledged ETH is currently at a loss

On March 2, the on-chain data platform CryptoQuant released a report saying that after the upgrade of Ethereum Shanghai, ETH’s pledged withdrawals may face lower selling pressure.

This conclusion comes from the profit and loss analysis of the pledged ETH. This analysis is based on two reasons: the first majority of staked ETH (60% or 10.3 million) is currently at a loss (compare the current ETH price to the price of each ETH when it was staked). Depositors in the second largest average staking pool are also currently in the red.

Typically, selling pressure occurs when market participants are sitting on huge profits, but this is not currently the case with staked ETH.

Furthermore, most of the profitable ETH stakes are less than a year old, and most of the gains are only in the 20-30% range, a return that has not coincided with major profit-taking events (sell-offs) in the past.

According to Bernstein analysts Gautam Chhugani and Manas Agrawal, Ethereum could experience explosive growth due to its star-studded constellation of competitive advantages, growth momentum, and clear market leadership.

In their latest analysis report, they pointed out that in the eight-year history of Ethereum, there has never been such a competitive advantage. After the upcoming Shanghai upgrade is completed, the deployment of EIP-4844 may reduce transaction costs by 10 times. Network fees will also drop further.

Justin Sun just pledged another 10,000 ETH ($16 million) on Lido. He currently pledged a total of 200,100 ETH ($320 million) and received 18.68 ETH in revenue within 24 hours, with an APY of approximately 3.6%.

It was reported yesterday that the wallet address marked “Justin Sun” pledged 150,100 ETH on Lido. Lido, the liquidity staking agreement, said that the amount of pledged ETH that flowed into its platform on that day exceeded 150,000.

It set the highest single-day staking traffic so far, but after reaching this number, the platform triggered the security restriction function “Staking Rate Limit”.