News linked to both this project and an event.
SpaceX is progressing with its IPO and seeking a valuation of approximately $1.78 trillion. If realized, it would become the world's seventh-largest company by market cap. However, the mid-to-long-term business path justifying this valuation remains unclear.Furthermore, SpaceX's core narrative is shifting. In February of this year, Musk integrated SpaceX with xAI, making artificial intelligence a key component of the company's strategy. Compared to the original core vision of "making humanity a multi-planetary species," AI now occupies a more prominent position in the company's narrative. In the first quarter, xAI-related business reportedly accounted for over three-quarters of capital expenditures, while approximately 93% of the total addressable market mentioned in the IPO filing is also related to AI.Musk has long been adept at restructuring business narratives to align with market preferences, as seen in previous cases like integrating SolarCity into Tesla and merging Twitter with the xAI ecosystem. SpaceX's new narrative combines rocket launches with AI, envisioning the deployment of AI data centers in orbit to build future computing infrastructure. However, SpaceX launched approximately 2,200 tons of payload into orbit last year, while Musk has suggested that realizing the orbital data center vision would require an annual launch capacity of about 1 million tons. Although Starlink and the rocket business already hold industry-leading positions, genuine cash flow will ultimately be needed to validate this massive valuation hypothesis. (Financial Times)
A Uniswap governance proposal seeks to extend the protocol’s fee collection and burning infrastructure to BNB Chain and Polygon, and to complete the fee activation process on Celo—which previously failed due to a configuration error. The proposal includes: setting the V2 protocol fee recipient addresses on BNB Chain, Polygon, and Celo to TokenJar; and designating V3OpenFeeAdapter as the owner of the V3 Factory on the respective chains. Additionally, on Celo, the feeToSetter role and ownership of the V4 PoolManager will be transferred to CrossChainAccount. According to the proposal, fees collected on each chain will be aggregated into their respective TokenJars, then UNI tokens will be bridged cross-chain back to Ethereum Mainnet and sent to the burn address.
Vitalik published an article titled “A Shallow Dive into Formal Verification,” introducing recent progress in applying formal verification to Ethereum’s cutting-edge research and development. The article states that developers can write code in Lean, EVM bytecode, or assembly language and verify its correctness via mathematically rigorous proofs that can be automatically checked—thereby improving both code efficiency and security. He notes that formal verification is especially suitable for complex yet well-defined-security systems such as STARKs, Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus, ZK-EVMs, and post-quantum signatures, and mentions related projects including Arklib, VCV-io, and evm-asm. The article also emphasizes that formal verification is not a panacea: it remains subject to limitations such as incorrect specification definitions, unverified code paths, hardware-level constraints, and side-channel attacks.
Nick Timiraos, known as the "Fed Mouthpiece," wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the discussion within the Federal Reserve regarding the interest rate path has undergone a noticeable shift. The focus is no longer primarily on when to restart rate cuts but has begun to consider under what conditions rate hikes might be necessary again. Since the Fed began releasing policy statements in 1994, disagreements over how to describe the policy direction—rather than actual rate changes—have been rare.Three regional Fed presidents, including Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan and Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, opposed retaining the wording "the next move is more likely a rate cut" at this week’s policy meeting, arguing that the next rate adjustment could be either a hike or a cut. Outgoing Fed Chair Jerome Powell stated that the committee is gradually shifting from a "rate-cut bias" to a "neutral stance" and noted that if rate hikes become necessary in the future, the Fed would first move to a neutral position before signaling increases. (WSJ)
Andre Cronje stated most current decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols no longer qualify as "DeFi in the strict sense" and are closer to commercial systems operated by teams. This has sparked industry division over whether "circuit breakers" should be introduced to mitigate attack risks.In an interview, Andre Cronje pointed out that early DeFi centered on immutable smart contracts, but today many protocols rely on upgradeable contracts, multi-signature permissions, off-chain infrastructure, and manual operational processes. In essence, they have transitioned from "immutable public goods" to "operable, for-profit businesses." He noted that against the backdrop of recent security incidents, including DeFi attacks involving approximately $280 million and $293 million, industry risks have expanded from simple smart contract vulnerabilities to "Web2-style risks" such as infrastructure issues, permission controls, and social engineering attacks.Regarding risk management, Cronje's firm Flying Tulip recently introduced circuit breakers that delay or queue withdrawals during abnormal fund outflows, providing an emergency response window of about six hours to prevent systemic bank runs and further losses.However, this mechanism has also sparked controversy. Michael Egorov believes that circuit breakers may introduce new centralized attack surfaces. If controlled by signers or administrators, they could instead become new security vulnerabilities or sources of freezing risk. He emphasized that DeFi design should minimize human intervention rather than increase manual control points. Industry analysts pointed out that this debate essentially reflects how DeFi is shifting from the ideal model of "code is law" toward a practical architecture of "hybrid governance plus operational control," while the security boundaries are being redefined. (Cointelegraph)