Morning Report | Aethir secures a $260 million enterprise contract with Axe Compute; New Fire Technology acquires Avenir Group's trading team; Polymarket's trading volume surpassed by Kalshi

整理：ChainCatcher

Important News:

• Aave TVL drops below $30 billion, with $16.2 billion flowing out from previous highs
• Bloomberg: Polymarket's trading volume surpassed by Kalshi, U.S. market layout frequently frustrated
• New Fire Technology acquires Avenir Group trading team and launches Bitcoin asset management service
• Aethir infrastructure secures $260 million enterprise contract from Axe Compute
• Tether confirms cooperation with the U.S. government to freeze over $344 million in USDT
• Trump Media Group shifts focus to crypto and financial services
• Circle proposes to raise USDC maximum deposit interest rate to 48.2% at Aave forum

What important events occurred in the past 24 hours?

Justin Sun has deposited a total of $1.3 billion in assets to Spark, with USDS Farming rewards reaching $5.38 million

According to ChainCatcher, on-chain analyst Ai Yi monitored that Justin Sun has deposited a total of $1.3 billion in assets to Spark, with USDS Farming rewards reaching $5.38 million.

Justin Sun's address 0x939...6a1d1 withdrew 300 million USDS from Sky in the past 3 hours and subsequently deposited it into Spark. The current deposits on the platform are as follows:

• USDS: $436 million, accounting for 18.72% of the deposit pool;
• USDC: $135 million, accounting for 28.17% of the deposit pool;
• USDT: $93.39 million, accounting for 9.89% of the deposit pool.

Over 100 crypto institutions call on the U.S. Senate to advance market structure bill review

According to ChainCatcher, CoinDesk reported that over 100 U.S. crypto companies and industry organizations have written to the Senate Banking Committee urging the advancement of the Clarity Act review to establish a federal regulatory framework for the digital asset market. Signatories include Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken, Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Consensys, and others.

Their core demands include clarifying the regulatory division of labor between the SEC and CFTC, protecting developers of non-custodial tools, simplifying information disclosure rules, and avoiding fragmented regulatory standards across states. The signatories stated that if the U.S. lacks a complete crypto regulatory framework in the long term, investment, jobs, and development activities may flow overseas.

Aethir infrastructure secures $260 million enterprise contract from Axe Compute

According to ChainCatcher, Nasdaq-listed company Axe Compute Inc. (NASDAQ: AGPU) announced that it has signed a 36-month contract worth approximately $260 million for AI infrastructure with an enterprise client, which includes the deployment of 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPU dedicated clusters and high-speed AI storage systems, expected to officially launch in the third quarter of 2026 at a Tier 3 data center in the U.S. This is the largest single enterprise contract since Axe Compute's establishment.

Axe Compute's underlying computing power infrastructure is supported by Aethir's decentralized GPU cloud. The contract includes dedicated 4.8 megawatts of N+1 redundant power, with deployment locations and service standards specified by the client, using a structured payment arrangement. Aethir co-founder and CEO Daniel Wang stated that this contract is the result of months of deep collaboration between the two teams: "The enterprise-level workloads supported by 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPUs are exactly the scale we aimed for when building Aethir's computing power infrastructure. Today's announcement proves that decentralized GPU infrastructure is capable of handling AI workloads from top global enterprises."

After the announcement, Axe Compute (NASDAQ: AGPU) stock price experienced significant volatility, with an intraday increase of over 166%, reaching $14.47, and the trading volume exceeding 100 times the three-month daily average.

Tether confirms cooperation with the U.S. government to freeze over $344 million in USDT

According to ChainCatcher, Tether announced that it has supported the U.S. government in freezing over $344 million in USDT, involving two wallet addresses. This freezing action was carried out in collaboration with the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and U.S. law enforcement agencies to prevent further movement of funds.

The freezing action was based on information provided by multiple U.S. law enforcement agencies, which indicated that these addresses were associated with illegal activities. Tether stated that when wallet addresses are linked to sanction evasion, criminal networks, or other illegal activities, the company will take freezing measures. This has now become Tether's routine response to legitimate requests from U.S. and global law enforcement agencies.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated, "USDT is by no means a haven for illegal activities. We take immediate action when there are credible links to sanctioned entities or criminal networks. Recent events have shown what can happen when platforms fail to act quickly, law enforcement fails, users are exposed, and trust is lost. Our approach is different; we combine blockchain transparency, real-time monitoring, and direct coordination with law enforcement to prevent the flow of funds. This is a responsibility we take very seriously as one of the largest issuers in the market."

This action is part of Tether's cooperation with U.S. law enforcement agencies. The U.S. Department of Justice previously confirmed Tether's support in law enforcement actions, successfully seizing nearly $61 million and approximately $225 million in "pork scam" funds.

A user profits $34,000 by interfering with Polymarket's temperature prediction market using heated weather sensors
According to ChainCatcher, a user profited $34,000 by interfering with weather sensors at Paris airport in the Polymarket weather prediction market. Polymarket previously used sensor data from Météo France near Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for settlement, and the user bought temperature options at a very low price that were much higher than market expectations. The user then used a portable heat source to heat the sensor, causing the readings to spike significantly in a short period and be recorded as the highest temperature of the day. This behavior occurred twice on April 6 and April 15, and Météo France has since discovered the anomaly and filed charges.
Trump Media Group shifts focus to crypto and financial services
According to ChainCatcher, Trump Media Technology Group is shifting its business focus from social media to crypto and financial services. Data shows that since Trump was re-elected in 2024, the company's stock price has dropped over 60%, with shareholders losing approximately $6 billion. Recently, the company applied to launch a crypto blue-chip ETF and plans to establish Bitcoin reserves.
SoftBank seeks $10 billion loan secured by OpenAI shares
According to ChainCatcher, market news indicates that SoftBank Group is seeking a $10 billion margin loan secured by its holdings in OpenAI shares, with a two-year loan term and an option to extend for another year. This move aims to provide funding support for SoftBank's continued investment in the AI sector.

New Fire Technology acquires Avenir Group trading team and launches Bitcoin asset management service

According to ChainCatcher, New Fire Technology (1611.HK) announced it will acquire the investment team and trading system of Li Lin's family office Avenir Group for $1.6 million.

After the acquisition is completed, New Fire Technology plans to launch a Bitcoin-denominated asset management service named Alpha BTC, aiming to attract over 10,000 Bitcoins in investments worth approximately $760 million within a year. This strategy will generate returns through derivatives trading such as options, with Bitcoin or IBIT ETF as the underlying assets, targeting crypto-native investors and local businesses in Hong Kong. Avenir Group holds 18.3 million shares of BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust, valued at $908 million, as of the end of 2025.

If FTX had not gone bankrupt, SBF's investment portfolio could have potential returns exceeding $100 billion

According to ChainCatcher, KOL AB Kuai.Dong (@_FORAB) compiled that FTX founder SBF is imprisoned for misappropriating approximately $16 billion in user assets, but the potential value of his investment portfolio has sparked widespread discussion.

If FTX had not undergone bankruptcy liquidation, the estimated returns on its holdings are as follows: Anthropic approximately $82.3 billion (about 165 times), SpaceX approximately $15 billion (about 75 times), Robinhood approximately $4.9 billion (about 8 times), Genesis Digital Assets approximately $3.5 billion (about 3 times), and AI programming tool Cursor approximately $3 billion (about 15,000 times, original investment only $200,000 for a 5% stake). The total potential value of these assets exceeds $100 billion.

MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay announces departure from parent company Consensys

According to ChainCatcher, MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay announced today (April 23) that he is officially leaving Consensys, ending over a decade of building MetaMask. He stated that the reason for his departure is career burnout and the need to spend more time with family, and he expressed his best wishes for the team's future development.

Dan Finlay also expressed satisfaction with the recently launched advanced permission feature (ERC-7715) of MetaMask, believing that this feature fills an important gap in the product for a long time, and he looks forward to experiencing this feature as an ordinary user in the future.

X releases two updates: XChat now supports sharing group chat links, will officially discontinue X Communities

According to ChainCatcher, Nikita Bier, head of X products and Solana advisor, announced two product changes regarding organizing communities on X, including:

XChat now supports a group chat feature with joinable links. Users can create a public link and share it directly to their timeline. Each group chat supports 350 members (and is still increasing).

Due to declining usage, the X platform will officially discontinue X Communities on May 6.

TD Cowen: Progress on crypto bill stalled, not just stablecoin yield controversy

According to ChainCatcher, investment bank TD Cowen stated that the disagreements surrounding the Clarity Act go beyond just stablecoin yield issues, with multiple real-world obstacles potentially slowing down the legislative process.

First, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is understaffed, with only one commissioner currently in office. In this situation, Congress is unlikely to confidently assign more crypto regulatory responsibilities to the agency, and filling personnel vacancies will take months. Second, the issue of prediction markets is heating up. Whether to include it in the bill's regulation, as well as potential insider trading and political conflict of interest (including controversies related to Trump-related projects), may lead some Democratic lawmakers to oppose the bill.

At the same time, the ongoing controversy surrounding the Trump family's crypto project World Liberty Financial is also increasing the political sensitivity of the bill, making bipartisan consensus harder to achieve. Geopolitics has also become a variable. Discussions about Iran potentially using crypto payments are reinforcing attention to anti-money laundering provisions, which could even introduce amendments unfavorable to the industry. Additionally, some lawmakers are attempting to include the Credit Card Competition Act, which, if advanced, could trigger new conflicts of interest and further delay overall legislation.

Japan's Financial Services Agency advances transition of crypto asset financial business law, simultaneously launching three stablecoin payment pilot experiments

According to ChainCatcher, market news indicates that at the "9th BCCC Collaborative Day" held on April 21, 2026, Shigeru Shimizu, head of the Risk Analysis Division of the Financial Services Agency, delivered a special speech revealing significant progress in crypto asset regulation. The agency has submitted a bill to the special Diet to transition crypto assets from the Fund Settlement Act to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, mainly involving four core contents: information disclosure regulations, new classifications for independent operators, strengthening penalties for unregistered operators, and preparing insider trading regulations.

At the same time, the Financial Services Agency is advancing three pilot experiments under the "Payment Enhancement Project (PIP)": first, a yen stablecoin cross-border payment trial involving three major banks; second, blockchain-based on-chain settlement of government bonds, corporate bonds, stocks, etc., aiming to achieve 24/7 continuous trading; third, an interbank tokenized deposit transfer experiment recently supported on April 3, which will be linked to the Bank of Japan's central bank reserve tokenization sandbox project. Shimizu stated that blockchain has great potential in enhancing the convenience of financial services and product diversification, and the Financial Services Agency will continue to promote institutional construction and practical support.

Bloomberg: Polymarket's trading volume surpassed by Kalshi, U.S. market layout frequently frustrated

According to ChainCatcher, Polymarket, which has long dominated prediction market trading volume, is facing multiple dilemmas. According to Dune Analytics data, its global trading volume has been surpassed by major competitor Kalshi. In terms of valuation, Kalshi announced a new round of financing last month, reaching a valuation of $22 billion, while Polymarket's recent valuation after receiving a $600 million investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) is $15 billion.

Polymarket's biggest bottleneck is the inability to officially launch in the U.S. market, with its U.S. application still in the testing phase, and March trading volume was only one-twentieth of Kalshi's. Technical challenges brought by blockchain architecture, repeated delays in product launches, recent fee adjustments causing user dissatisfaction, and the exchange having been down for over an hour continue to plague the platform.

Additionally, Polymarket has faced letters from Democratic lawmakers in Congress requesting the CFTC to intervene due to allowing users to bet on controversial topics such as war and nuclear explosions. ICE CEO Sprecher remains optimistic but admits it could either be a total failure or a home run.

Aave TVL drops below $30 billion, with $16.2 billion flowing out from previous highs

According to ChainCatcher, on-chain analyst Yu Jin monitored that Aave's TVL has dropped below $30 billion.

This data has fallen from $45.8 billion before the rsETH incident to the current $29.6 billion, with an outflow of $16.2 billion.
Yili Hua: The past wave of crypto VC and project demise was due to mistakenly benchmarking Web2; AI + finance is a new opportunity

According to ChainCatcher, Liquid Capital founder Jack Yi (Yili Hua) stated on the X platform: "The past wave of crypto VC and project demise has a core reason, which is that the financing funds were mostly consumed in maintaining teams to develop useless web3 products, with the biggest misconception being benchmarking against web2 products. Essentially, web3 is a financial industry that does not need to replicate web2 products. The most successful companies in the past crypto industry have been financial products, from stablecoins, exchanges to payment companies."

"Now that the AI era has arrived, there is no need for large financing to recruit teams, and AI + finance is a new opportunity. We believe that excellent founders can achieve top companies with just a few elites, which is currently the biggest opportunity for primary investment."

Circle proposes to raise USDC maximum deposit interest rate to 48.2% at Aave forum

According to ChainCatcher, Circle's chief economist Gordon Liao initiated a proposal at the Aave governance forum, suggesting an urgent adjustment to the USDC interest rate parameters in the Aave V3 Ethereum main pool to address the situation where the pool's utilization rate has remained at a very high level of 99.87% for four consecutive days following the KelpDAO attack incident.

Liao stated that Aave's current interest rate mechanism has failed to effectively "clear" the market. The current supply scale of the fund pool is $1.89 billion, with the borrowing scale also at $1.89 billion, and available liquidity is less than $3 million. The borrowing interest rate remains at the upper limit after the turning point (approximately 14%), and in the past 24 hours, the fund pool has shrunk by approximately $60 million—due to repayment funds being used one by one to meet withdrawal demands in the queue.

Therefore, the Slope 2 parameter in the USDC deposit interest rate curve should be immediately raised from approximately 10% to 40% through the Risk Steward mechanism, and the target should be further raised to 50% within 5 to 7 days through governance voting confirmation. Meanwhile, the optimal utilization rate will be lowered from 92% to 87% during the transition phase and will eventually be lowered to 85% after final confirmation. According to Liao's proposal, under the new parameter settings, when the utilization rate reaches 100%, the USDC maximum deposit interest rate will increase from approximately 12.6% to 48.2%.

Meme Popularity Rankings

According to the meme token tracking and analysis platform GMGN, as of April 24, 09:00,

The top five popular tokens in the past 24 hours for ETH are: HEX, SHIB, LINK, PEPE, mUSD

The top five popular tokens in the past 24 hours for Solana are: swarms, 67, neet, LOL, Buttcoin

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

What are some interesting articles worth reading in the past 24 hours?

Watching Aave collapse while Spark rises

On April 18, attackers exploited a vulnerability in the Kelp DAO cross-chain bridge's validation nodes, releasing approximately $292 million of uncollateralized rsETH out of thin air, which was then deposited into Aave to borrow real WETH.

This batch of uncollateralized rsETH was accepted as compliant collateral, but the borrowed real WETH could not be equivalently covered, leading Aave to face a maximum bad debt exposure of $230.1 million.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin, as of the morning of April 23, Aave's TVL has dropped below $30 billion, falling from $45.8 billion before the incident to $29.6 billion, with an outflow of $16.2 billion, a decline of over 40%.

Lattice Capital founder: Crypto VC, seeing is believing

This week's "hot topic" on crypto Twitter seems to be the general concern: does the reduction of available funds mean that cryptocurrency is no longer as attractive? The scale of crypto venture capital is clearly shrinking—this is indisputable.

As for why this is happening and what it means, there is more debate. Rob Hadick believes that crypto venture capital is concentrating on the best founders and the best funds, which is precisely a sign of industry maturity. Meanwhile, Meltem argues that the reasons for the contraction are (a) a lack of high-quality early founders, and (b) compared to other high-growth industries, the scalable area of cryptocurrency is too small.

I don't have much to add to this specific debate. Clearly, there are still outstanding founders building projects in the crypto space. However, compared to 2021, there are significantly fewer founders starting businesses in the crypto field, while there are noticeably more founders starting businesses in other fields like AI. Is this due to a shortage of capital, or is this gap causing a shortage of capital? Both may be true.

A voice from a seasoned Polymarket user: Actually, we have already been surpassed by competitors

I have had this article in hand for a while.

I have always wanted to write it but have been holding back, hoping that things would quietly self-correct. Until this morning when Bloomberg released the article "Polymarket loses its leading position in the prediction market due to delays and rebounds." To be honest, this report has already said most of what I wanted to say. So I will quote it extensively to let it share some of the weight.

Polymarket is facing increasing operational setbacks in trying to reach key audiences (U.S. customers) and has now fallen behind its main competitor. From bloomberg.com

This title is quite painful. And it should be.

Since mid-2024, I have been observing Polymarket. I agree with its vision, defending the platform during every regulatory panic, and recommending it to every trader I know. The prediction market is one of the most important financial infrastructures of this decade, and Polymarket is the company I have always hoped would win this race.

Who will replace AAVE as the new king?

The lending landscape of Ethereum and Solana follows an extremely similar script, with the only real comparable phase transition (from the first phase to the second phase) occurring about 25% faster on Solana. The third phase has just begun, and whether Solana can maintain this pace remains uncertain.

• Ethereum's first to second phase (from Compound's peak to Aave establishing an advantage): about 2 years
• Solana's first to second phase (from MarginFi's peak to Kamino establishing an advantage): about 18 months
• Both ecosystems are now in the third phase, with new challengers continuously narrowing the gap

But this time, I do not believe the outcome will be the same. The following content will explain the reasons one by one.