News Heat Trend
Project Overview
NEAR is a sharded, proof-of-stake, layer-one blockchain that aims to incentivize a network of computers to operate a platform for developers to create and launch decentralized applications. Central to its design is the concept of sharding, a process that splits the network's infrastructure into several segments so that nodes only have to handle a fraction of the network's transactions. The NEAR mainnet went live in August 2020.
Analyst: HYPE and AI Tokens May Lead the Next Altcoin Season as Market Risk Appetite Returns
Hyperliquid has recently significantly outperformed the broader market. Its token, HYPE, hit an all-time high following the launch of two related ETFs in the United States. Meanwhile, European traders are accelerating their migration to the platform due to restricted access to perpetual contracts on regulated exchanges. Market analyst Michael van de Poppe stated that with Hyperliquid's continued rally and renewed interest in AI-related crypto projects, signs of improving risk appetite are emerging in the altcoin market. Hyperliquid’s expansion into tokenized stocks, commodities, and pre-IPO assets is strengthening the on-chain asset tokenization trend. He suggested that if market sentiment continues to improve, HYPE’s price could target $100 or even higher.However, Michael van de Poppe also stressed that while Hyperliquid holds a short-term advantage, Solana offers greater long-term investment certainty, transitioning from a "speculative ecosystem" to institutional-grade infrastructure. In the AI track, he noted that NEAR Protocol and Bittensor remain significantly undervalued, citing a disconnect between their fundamental growth and valuations. He pointed out that NEAR’s revenue growth potential and Bittensor’s subnet expansion could support higher valuation ranges. Additionally, he indicated that the privacy sector retains long-term demand, but fully anonymous systems face regulatory pressure. The future is more likely to be dominated by zero-knowledge proofs and compliant privacy solutions.On the macro level, Michael van de Poppe highlighted that bond yields and central bank policies remain the core drivers of the crypto market, with changes in Japanese government bond yields potentially serving as a key barometer. (CoinDesk)
OpenGradient Raises $9.5M, with Participation from a16z crypto
OpenGradient, a verifiable AI computation layer, has announced the completion of a $9.5 million funding round. Investors include a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, Foresight Ventures, Pragma, SALT, Symbolic Capital, Canonical Crypto, Black Dragon, NEAR, Celestia, Thanefield Capital, and angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase. The new funds will support the development and expansion of a decentralized infrastructure network for hosting, executing, and verifying AI models—enabling open and auditable model execution.
Bankless Founder: Lighter (LIT) Market Rally Is Back
Odaily reports: Bankless founder David Hoffman reposted Lighter's regulatory update on X and wrote: "Lighter season back on btw."During Lighter's Q3 investor call held last night via webcast, David Hoffman, speaking as an investor, asked: "Given that Lighter has already had extensive prior communication with the CFTC (U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission), do you expect the approval of the DCM (Designated Contract Market) and DCO (Derivatives Clearing Organization) licenses to come earlier than the CFTC's stipulated 180-day review period?"Lighter founder and CEO Vladimir Novakovski responded: "We believe that the extensive prior communication will make the whole process much smoother... The CFTC currently has a lot on its plate, so we can't give an exact timeline yet... However, the CFTC is a fast-moving team internally, so we expect the overall approval process to go relatively smoothly."Previously, David Hoffman reportedly sold all his ETH and rotated into tokens such as LIT, ZEC, and NEAR, with the rotated tokens subsequently significantly outperforming ETH.
NEAR co-founders share ecosystem application development directions and distribution strategies, covering AI, cross-chain payments, private transactions, and other focus areas.
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin posted that the recent increase in developer activity and further reduction in development barriers within the ecosystem center on what applications to build and how to establish distribution channels. In response, he proposed a series of potential building directions, including AI virtual pets combining NEAR AI’s on-chain verifiable inference with non-fungible tokens (NFTs); a universal checkout component supporting cross-chain intent payments; a decentralized encyclopedia integrating prediction markets with AI-generated content; a privacy-oriented OTC market based on NEAR Intents, alongside liquidation-resistant lending and perpetual contract management; a cross-chain event registration escrow tool backed by staking deposits; a privacy-preserving code review agent; a corporate cap table management tool; Delta-neutral strategy management; private copy trading utilizing view keys; an end-to-end encrypted medical auxiliary diagnostic system; a privacy-focused voice transcription desktop application; and AI benchmarking based on private test sets, among others.
The $3.8 million in stolen NEAR Intents funds has been fully recovered.
Alex Shevchenko, General Manager of NEAR Intents, stated that just hours after issuing a 48-hour return deadline to the identified attacker, the $3.8 million stolen from NEAR Intents has been fully refunded. The team has halted its investigation and is calling on security researchers to report issues through a bug bounty program in the future, rather than disrupting network services.
NEAR Intents Claims It Has Confirmed the Hacker's Identity, Demands Return of $3.8 Million in Stolen Funds Within 48 Hours
According to Cointelegraph, Alex Shevchenko, General Manager of NEAR Intents, stated that the team has identified the hackers behind the previous security incident and given them a 48-hour deadline to return the stolen funds through a "responsible disclosure." NEAR Intents previously suspended its services due to a vulnerability in the interaction between the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and its smart contracts. Initial investigations revealed that approximately $3.8 million in user funds were stolen in the incident, and the team has committed to fully compensating affected users. On-chain detective ZachXBT stated that the stolen funds were subsequently transferred to KuCoin and cross-chain converted into Bitcoin.
NEAR Intents Hit by $3.8 Million Exploit, Gives Hacker 48 Hours to Return Funds
Odaily News: NEAR Intents has stated that it has identified the attacker responsible for the loss of user funds and has demanded the return of $3.8 million within 48 hours through a "responsible disclosure" mechanism, after which the window will be closed.NEAR Intents suspended services on Thursday after discovering a vulnerability in the interaction between the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and its smart contracts. A preliminary investigation showed that the attack resulted in the theft of $3.8 million in user funds, and the platform has committed to fully compensating affected users.On-chain investigator ZachXBT disclosed that the related funds were transferred to the KuCoin exchange and subsequently bridged to Bitcoin. (Cointelegraph)
$388 Million in Crypto Assets Stolen, Bitget CEO Says Full Recovery Unlikely
Odaily News — Gracy Chen, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitget, said the company is not optimistic about recovering the $388 million in crypto assets lost in last week's security incident. Citing the Bybit hack in 2025 as a reference, she noted that approximately one year after that incident, only about 3.5% of the stolen funds had been frozen, and that this does not equate to a completed recovery.Bitget has set up a bounty program offering 5% rewards for frozen funds and recovered funds respectively. The NEAR Intents team said it has intercepted over $50 million in assets related to the attack and frozen approximately $500,000. Tether and Circle have blacklisted the relevant wallets, freezing $318,000 worth of USDT and USDC.Gracy Chen stated that preliminary investigations indicate the attack may match VPN addresses used by North Korea-linked groups, but Bitget has not yet fully ruled out the possibility of an insider job. Bitget has resumed withdrawals in phases, starting with Bitcoin transactions on Monday and continuing with ETH transactions on Tuesday. (Cointelegraph)
A trader with $842K in unrealized profit and a 100% win rate is long 27,000 ETH
according to Lookonchain monitoring, a trader with a 100% win rate (0xe813) went long 26,974 ETH after the market decline, with a position value of $63.88 million and current unrealized profit of $842,000. This trader previously made $3.3 million in profit through NEAR trading.
Bankless Founder: Lighter (LIT) Market Rally Is Back
Odaily reports: Bankless founder David Hoffman reposted Lighter's regulatory update on X and wrote: "Lighter season back on btw."During Lighter's Q3 investor call held last night via webcast, David Hoffman, speaking as an investor, asked: "Given that Lighter has already had extensive prior communication with the CFTC (U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission), do you expect the approval of the DCM (Designated Contract Market) and DCO (Derivatives Clearing Organization) licenses to come earlier than the CFTC's stipulated 180-day review period?"Lighter founder and CEO Vladimir Novakovski responded: "We believe that the extensive prior communication will make the whole process much smoother... The CFTC currently has a lot on its plate, so we can't give an exact timeline yet... However, the CFTC is a fast-moving team internally, so we expect the overall approval process to go relatively smoothly."Previously, David Hoffman reportedly sold all his ETH and rotated into tokens such as LIT, ZEC, and NEAR, with the rotated tokens subsequently significantly outperforming ETH.
NEAR Protocol Launches Confidential Account SOL Yield Vault, Deployed by Gauntlet on Kamino
Odaily News: NEAR Protocol has announced support for users to earn SOL yield through confidential accounts. After users deposit funds into the vault, the vault cannot know their address, and there is no lock-up requirement, allowing redemption or withdrawal at any time. The related vault was deployed by Gauntlet on Kamino.
$187 M Position Value: A Whale Opens Max-Leverage Longs on 1,822 BTC and 15,270 ETH
Odaily News: According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, a whale opened max-leverage long positions on BTC and ETH worth $187 million 4 hours ago. The BTC long position is 1,822 coins, valued at $150 million, with an entry price of $82,409 and a liquidation price of $80,634; the ETH long position is 15,270 coins, valued at $37.33 million, with an entry price of $2,455 and a liquidation price of $2,406. The whale's most successful previous trade yielded a profit of $14.8 million: going long on NEAR at $2.14 in late August and taking profit at $4.88 in late September.
AI Could Break Encryption Algorithms, Ethereum Researchers Call for "Bunker Mode"
According to Cointelegraph, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned that the rapid advancement of AI could accelerate mathematical attacks against the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), potentially breaking existing cryptographic systems within months under the worst-case scenario, and called on the industry to initiate "bunker mode"—transferring assets to new addresses with previously unexposed public keys to mitigate risk. Several industry insiders, however, expressed reservations. Coinbase Chief Cryptographer Yehuda Lindell stated there is currently "no evidence" that the mathematical assumptions underpinning ECDSA have been weakened; Trezor Bitcoin analyst Lucien Bourdon similarly noted that migrating assets could backfire and inadvertently create opportunities for scams. MetaMask founder Taylor Monahan was even more direct, asserting that if elliptic curve cryptography were truly compromised, "the entire world would go to zero," rendering bunker mode ineffective. Meanwhile, Ethereum has laid out a post-quantum roadmap based on hash-based signatures and ZK proofs, while public blockchains such as Solana and NEAR are also exploring their own quantum-safe alternatives, though concrete deployment timelines remain unset.
Complete liquidation: a certain address's 500,000 NEAR long position worth $2.64 million
According to Lookonchain monitoring, as the market declined, a certain address's 500,000 NEAR long position was completely liquidated, with the position valued at $2.64 million.
The Zcash development team plans to assign a unique viewing key for each ZEC cross-chain swap to mitigate future quantum computing risks.
According to CoinDesk, the development team behind Zcash's new node software, Zakura, plans to generate a unique viewing key for each ZEC swap conducted via NEAR Intents, while the spending key remains secured by the user's primary account. Under the current architecture, when users swap private ZEC for USDC via NEAR Intents, one of their Zcash privacy addresses is publicly broadcast on the NEAR public chain as a refund address and remains retained after the swap is completed. While this address currently does not leak information, sufficiently powerful quantum computers in the future could potentially reverse-engineer the viewing key using Shor's algorithm, thereby linking all payments received by that account, including amounts and memos. By implementing a "one-key-per-swap" approach, even if a refund address is compromised, attackers will only be able to view payments related to that specific swap. To address the issue of having to scan the entire blockchain sequentially during wallet recovery due to an abundance of keys, Zakura employs Private Information Retrieval (PIR) technology, allowing the wallet to query the location of incoming refunds without the database learning which address was queried.
NEAR Intents releases post-mortem on the October 1 vulnerability incident: $3.8 million in funds fully recovered, deposit notification feature removed
In a postmortem article published by Alex Shevchenko (@AlexAuroraDev), lead of NEAR Intents, a vulnerability was identified in the NEAR Intents contract's deposit notification mechanism when interacting with third-party contracts. The attacker deployed a contract that caused the notification call to fail, triggering the token contract to refund the deposits while the NEAR Intents contract retained the deposit records. Through 23 failed deposit transactions, the attacker generated approximately $3.8 million in "phantom funds," which were subsequently withdrawn to external chains via Omni infrastructure. This vulnerability resided in the NEAR Intents contract rather than in the Omni infrastructure. The timeline indicates the attack occurred between September 29 and October 1. The team detected withdrawal anomalies on October 1 and paused the contract within 29 minutes. Thanks to collaboration between the SHIELD security layer, on-chain tracking efforts, and industry security researchers, the attacker fully returned the funds on October 2, and all affected users have been compensated. The postmortem highlighted that existing monitoring only tracked discrepancies between aggregate token balances on the source chain versus NEAR, failing to monitor the mismatch between total user balances and contract token balances. This oversight allowed the attack to proceed undetected for several days. For remediation, the team has completely disabled the deposit notification functionality and implemented new monitoring for discrepancies between total user balances and contract balances. If this invariant is violated, the contract will automatically pause. On October 7, white hat research
AI Could Break Encryption Algorithms, Ethereum Researchers Call for "Bunker Mode"
According to Cointelegraph, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned that the rapid advancement of AI could accelerate mathematical attacks against the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), potentially breaking existing cryptographic systems within months under the worst-case scenario, and called on the industry to initiate "bunker mode"—transferring assets to new addresses with previously unexposed public keys to mitigate risk. Several industry insiders, however, expressed reservations. Coinbase Chief Cryptographer Yehuda Lindell stated there is currently "no evidence" that the mathematical assumptions underpinning ECDSA have been weakened; Trezor Bitcoin analyst Lucien Bourdon similarly noted that migrating assets could backfire and inadvertently create opportunities for scams. MetaMask founder Taylor Monahan was even more direct, asserting that if elliptic curve cryptography were truly compromised, "the entire world would go to zero," rendering bunker mode ineffective. Meanwhile, Ethereum has laid out a post-quantum roadmap based on hash-based signatures and ZK proofs, while public blockchains such as Solana and NEAR are also exploring their own quantum-safe alternatives, though concrete deployment timelines remain unset.
NEAR accounts can gain quantum-resistant capability through an upgrade, with no need to migrate assets
Illia Polosukhin posted on X platform that NEAR accounts can gain quantum-resistant capability through a key upgrade, and users do not need to migrate assets.
The $3.8 million in stolen NEAR Intents funds has been fully recovered.
Alex Shevchenko, General Manager of NEAR Intents, stated that just hours after issuing a 48-hour return deadline to the identified attacker, the $3.8 million stolen from NEAR Intents has been fully refunded. The team has halted its investigation and is calling on security researchers to report issues through a bug bounty program in the future, rather than disrupting network services.
NEAR Intents Claims It Has Confirmed the Hacker's Identity, Demands Return of $3.8 Million in Stolen Funds Within 48 Hours
According to Cointelegraph, Alex Shevchenko, General Manager of NEAR Intents, stated that the team has identified the hackers behind the previous security incident and given them a 48-hour deadline to return the stolen funds through a "responsible disclosure." NEAR Intents previously suspended its services due to a vulnerability in the interaction between the Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure and its smart contracts. Initial investigations revealed that approximately $3.8 million in user funds were stolen in the incident, and the team has committed to fully compensating affected users. On-chain detective ZachXBT stated that the stolen funds were subsequently transferred to KuCoin and cross-chain converted into Bitcoin.
Maximum Annual Issuance Rate Proposed to Drop to 1.6%: NEAR Governance Proposal HSP-029 Enters Voting Phase
Odaily Report: NEAR ecosystem governance proposal HSP-029 has entered the voting phase, proposing to gradually reduce the maximum annual issuance rate of the NEAR token from 2.5% to 1.6%. The proposal, put forward by SVRN CEO Sal Ternullo, plans to decrease linearly by approximately 3.75 basis points per epoch over 24 months, while maintaining the 90/10 split between stakers and the treasury. If passed, a 90-day grace period will be implemented before the reduction officially begins.Proposal estimates show that the plan is expected to reduce NEAR issuance by approximately 11.8 million tokens over two years, and by a cumulative total of approximately 66.1 million tokens over six years, equivalent to a 4.36% reduction in supply compared to the current state. The staking annualized yield will gradually decrease from the current 5.268% to 3.372%. The proposal must go through a dual process to take effect: after passing the House of Stake vote, validators must independently adopt it through the standard protocol upgrade process. Currently, the NEAR network has 406 active validators with a staking rate of 42.71%.
The Zcash development team plans to assign a unique viewing key for each ZEC cross-chain swap to mitigate future quantum computing risks.
According to CoinDesk, the development team behind Zcash's new node software, Zakura, plans to generate a unique viewing key for each ZEC swap conducted via NEAR Intents, while the spending key remains secured by the user's primary account. Under the current architecture, when users swap private ZEC for USDC via NEAR Intents, one of their Zcash privacy addresses is publicly broadcast on the NEAR public chain as a refund address and remains retained after the swap is completed. While this address currently does not leak information, sufficiently powerful quantum computers in the future could potentially reverse-engineer the viewing key using Shor's algorithm, thereby linking all payments received by that account, including amounts and memos. By implementing a "one-key-per-swap" approach, even if a refund address is compromised, attackers will only be able to view payments related to that specific swap. To address the issue of having to scan the entire blockchain sequentially during wallet recovery due to an abundance of keys, Zakura employs Private Information Retrieval (PIR) technology, allowing the wallet to query the location of incoming refunds without the database learning which address was queried.
NEAR Intents releases post-mortem on the October 1 vulnerability incident: $3.8 million in funds fully recovered, deposit notification feature removed
In a postmortem article published by Alex Shevchenko (@AlexAuroraDev), lead of NEAR Intents, a vulnerability was identified in the NEAR Intents contract's deposit notification mechanism when interacting with third-party contracts. The attacker deployed a contract that caused the notification call to fail, triggering the token contract to refund the deposits while the NEAR Intents contract retained the deposit records. Through 23 failed deposit transactions, the attacker generated approximately $3.8 million in "phantom funds," which were subsequently withdrawn to external chains via Omni infrastructure. This vulnerability resided in the NEAR Intents contract rather than in the Omni infrastructure. The timeline indicates the attack occurred between September 29 and October 1. The team detected withdrawal anomalies on October 1 and paused the contract within 29 minutes. Thanks to collaboration between the SHIELD security layer, on-chain tracking efforts, and industry security researchers, the attacker fully returned the funds on October 2, and all affected users have been compensated. The postmortem highlighted that existing monitoring only tracked discrepancies between aggregate token balances on the source chain versus NEAR, failing to monitor the mismatch between total user balances and contract token balances. This oversight allowed the attack to proceed undetected for several days. For remediation, the team has completely disabled the deposit notification functionality and implemented new monitoring for discrepancies between total user balances and contract balances. If this invariant is violated, the contract will automatically pause. On October 7, white hat research
NEAR Connects to Solana via Sunrise, Price Rises 14% in 24 Hours
Odaily News: Near Protocol and Sunrise announced on October 15 that NEAR has connected to Solana via Sunrise, and NEAR liquidity is now accessible across Solana wallets, the decentralized exchange Jupiter, Raydium, and trading aggregators.This cross-chain pathway is powered by Near Intents, with NEAR as the first asset onboarded. The partners plan to support more assets and eventually integrate Near Intents directly into Sunrise.Following the announcement, NEAR is trading in the $5.24 to $5.30 range, up approximately 14% over 24 hours; its price has more than doubled over the past 30 days.Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz has joined the Near Foundation Council, where he will contribute to product strategy, market execution, and ecosystem development. (Bitcoin.com News)
NEAR Protocol Launches Confidential Account SOL Yield Vault, Deployed by Gauntlet on Kamino
Odaily News: NEAR Protocol has announced support for users to earn SOL yield through confidential accounts. After users deposit funds into the vault, the vault cannot know their address, and there is no lock-up requirement, allowing redemption or withdrawal at any time. The related vault was deployed by Gauntlet on Kamino.
SVRN Acquires NEAR Infrastructure Platform FastNEAR
Odaily News: NEAR treasury company SVRN has announced the acquisition of NEAR infrastructure platform FastNEAR. FastNEAR will be incorporated into SVRN as a wholly-owned subsidiary, and its co-founders Evgeny (Eugene) Kuzyakov and Mike Purvis will also join the SVRN team. FastNEAR is a high-performance RPC infrastructure provider for NEAR applications, supporting the majority of NEAR's data layer, including server clusters that handle network read and write operations, archival infrastructure that stores complete transaction history records, and NEARDATA, a data source for developers to process historical records.
Related news
A Year in Strong Tokens: Only 3 Categories Outperformed Bitcoin, AI and Privacy Sectors Rose Against the Trend
Odaily reports: DeFi researcher Ignas published a roundup of strong tokens for the year, noting that since the start of the year only three categories of tokens—trading, AI, and privacy—have outperformed Bitcoin, among which:1. Trading-related tokens have been the most outstanding performers: DRV gained 665%, HYPE rose 200%, PUMP rose 121%, and RAY rose 106%. The rally logic for these tokens is that speculative trading generates fee revenue for the protocols, which then support token value through buyback mechanisms.2. Among AI-related tokens, VVV rose 1431%, NEAR rose 203%, and GRASS rose 151%;3. Among privacy-related tokens, ZEC rose 137% and XMR rose 37%.In addition, Ignas also mentioned QNT and MORPHO in the institutional adoption narrative, which rose 173% and 89% respectively. However, aside from the above categories, most tokens have performed poorly this year. Finding tokens with strong revenue-generating capacity is currently a relatively easy trading approach to grasp.
A trader with $842K in unrealized profit and a 100% win rate is long 27,000 ETH
according to Lookonchain monitoring, a trader with a 100% win rate (0xe813) went long 26,974 ETH after the market decline, with a position value of $63.88 million and current unrealized profit of $842,000. This trader previously made $3.3 million in profit through NEAR trading.
Dragonfly Partner Questions DFINITY's Technical Infringement Allegations: Related Patent Was Only Approved at the End of July
Dragonfly partner Haseeb Qureshi responded via post to DFINITY founder Dominic Williams' earlier allegations that NEAR Intents had unauthorizedly used threshold ECDSA signature technology. Screenshots of the relevant patent application status shared by Qureshi show that the patent was not approved until late July this year, having previously been in a "patent application" state. NEAR Intents modified the relevant algorithm in September this year. Haseeb Qureshi added that, if Dominic Williams' own account is accurate, the alleged patent infringement may have covered only a period of roughly one month. Furthermore, the relevant algorithm was originally published in an academic paper under a CC BY license, which NEAR also referenced in its implementation.
DFINY founder accuses NEAR Intents of using its proprietary threshold signature technology
DFINTIY founder Dominic Williams (@dominic_w) posted on X stating that the key components relied upon by NEAR's Chain Abstraction and Intents utilize the threshold ECDSA algorithm from a paper published by DFINITY in 2022. He stated that the technology was only licensed for use on the Internet Computer, and accused NEAR of recruiting former employees fired by DFINITY in 2021 to lead the relevant work. He further claimed that the algorithm can triple signing speeds compared to other solutions. Williams also questioned the degree of decentralization of NEAR, noting that its related system operates on only 8 servers, while the corresponding solution for the Internet Computer runs on subnets comprising around 50 independent node operators. Citing pull request #4503 and issue #4324 in the NEAR MPC repository on GitHub, he stated that NEAR is attempting to downgrade from a 1-round signing scheme to a slower 3-round scheme. Williams indicated that the matter involves legal considerations, asserting that DFINITY would be willing to share the technology under fair terms if NEAR had sought collaboration beforehand and properly attributed the technology's origin. At present, the post contains only one-sided allegations, with no response yet seen from NEAR, and the related claims have not yet...
DFINITY 创始人指控 NEAR Intents 使用其专有密码学技术，称或涉及知识产权侵权
DFINITY 创始人 Dominic Williams 发文指控，NEAR Intents 的链抽象架构使用了 DFINITY 开发的专有门限 ECDSA 签名技术，相关技术原本仅授权用于 Internet Computer。他称，NEAR 团队可能将相关算法整合至开源门限密码学库，并通过约 8 台服务器运行相关系统，质疑其去中心化程度及用户资产安全性。
Bankless Founder: Lighter (LIT) Market Rally Is Back
Odaily reports: Bankless founder David Hoffman reposted Lighter's regulatory update on X and wrote: "Lighter season back on btw."During Lighter's Q3 investor call held last night via webcast, David Hoffman, speaking as an investor, asked: "Given that Lighter has already had extensive prior communication with the CFTC (U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission), do you expect the approval of the DCM (Designated Contract Market) and DCO (Derivatives Clearing Organization) licenses to come earlier than the CFTC's stipulated 180-day review period?"Lighter founder and CEO Vladimir Novakovski responded: "We believe that the extensive prior communication will make the whole process much smoother... The CFTC currently has a lot on its plate, so we can't give an exact timeline yet... However, the CFTC is a fast-moving team internally, so we expect the overall approval process to go relatively smoothly."Previously, David Hoffman reportedly sold all his ETH and rotated into tokens such as LIT, ZEC, and NEAR, with the rotated tokens subsequently significantly outperforming ETH.