Industry Reports

Gate News bot message, new analysis reveals that nearly 50% of Polymarket's trading volume may be inauthentic. Out of $337 million in daily volume, 28% ($94.7 million) comes from airdrop farmers trading in stagnant markets that remain below 2% or above 98% for over 36 hours to inflate wallet statist

In February, the trading volume of stablecoins on the Solana blockchain reached $650 billion, a record high and double that of last year. The surge in retail payment demand has driven the growth of stablecoin transactions, with Solana gradually shifting from Meme coins to stablecoin trading, indicating an increase in payment use cases. Although Ethereum still dominates the market, stablecoins could become a key pillar of the Solana network.

Author: Clow, Plain Language Blockchain An AI wrote a piece of code that requires data for verification. It sent an HTTP request, and the server returned a number: 402. Then, it paid $0.001 using USDC. Less than a second later, the data was back. This transaction involved no account, no password, no bank card, no KYC. The entire process involved no human participation. This is no longer science fiction. By the end of 2025, the x402 protocol will have processed over 100 million such transactions; in the first 30 days of this year alone, another 15 million. The "Payment Code" that slept for thirty years In 1990, when drafting the HTTP protocol, the creators specifically reserved a spot for status code 402: Payment Required. The meaning is straightforward—"Payment is required to proceed."

RippleX's J. Ayo Akinyele outlined post-bug measures for improving XRPL security, emphasizing AI integration in development processes to enhance protective mechanisms and audit standards, ensuring safer transaction handling and system resilience.

A16z Crypto – the Web3 investment branch of the leading venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz – has criticized the widespread but inaccurate use of the term “ZK” within the developer community in a recent blog post introducing Jolt zkVM. According to the article, “most zkVMs in reality are not fully zero-knowledge and often rely on simplified assumptions or partial proofs, which can lead to misconceptions about their security and privacy guarantees.”

Research by the Bitcoin Policy Research Institute shows that among 36 AI models, most AI agents prefer Bitcoin in economic activities, with 79.1% choosing Bitcoin in long-term value preservation scenarios, while fiat currencies are less favored. Stablecoins are more popular in real-time payment scenarios (53.2%). There are significant differences in Bitcoin preferences among different vendors, and the influence of training data on the results should be interpreted with caution.

The report shows that the adoption of cryptocurrencies in Latin America is accelerating, with Argentina emerging as a leading country, having the highest number of monthly active users in the Latin American market. The use of cryptocurrencies is related to changes in payment methods, with the importance of stablecoins in daily transactions gradually increasing. By 2025, the adoption of cryptocurrencies in Argentina and Peru is expected to further grow, driving the increase in digital asset penetration.

Tether has renewed the "Plan ₿" agreement with the City of Lugano, launching the second phase from 2026 to 2030, with an investment of 5 million Swiss Francs for digital infrastructure and blockchain applications. The project has already attracted support from over 400 merchants for digital asset payments and has promoted the development of fintech. The second phase will focus on digital asset management, automation systems, and privacy protection, aiming to enhance the city's digital economy competitiveness.

Despite last year's turbulence in the cryptocurrency market, stablecoin trading volume reached $400 billion, and Stripe's stablecoin settlement platform Bridge's trading volume grew fourfold. Bridge simplifies stablecoin payment processes, driving Visa's stablecoin card expansion to over 100 countries worldwide, enhancing corporate payment and fund management efficiency.

The integration of blockchain technology with the Delta-8 cannabis industry enhances supply chain traceability and data transparency, helping to address product quality and regulatory issues. Through smart contracts and encrypted payments, it promotes industry standardization and efficiency. Blockchain can also record environmental data, supporting sustainable development, and indicating a transparent and mature market for cannabinoid health products.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) report states that stablecoins have become the preferred method for North Korea, Iran, and other countries to conduct illegal transactions, involving scam amounts as high as $51 billion. FATF calls for strengthening anti-money laundering regulations for stablecoin issuers and emphasizes that non-custodial wallets have become regulatory loopholes that need to be quickly addressed to fill the regulatory gap.

OpenClaw has rapidly risen in just three months to become one of the most popular open-source projects. Founder Steinberger strongly rejects the hype around cryptocurrencies, publicly distancing himself from the crypto community, and has even considered abandoning the project due to speculation issues. He emphasizes maintaining technological neutrality and opposes using the project for speculative trading. This reflects the conflict between AI technology development and the capital markets.

The recently released Crypto Weekly Report shows that the crypto market is experiencing volatility and consolidation, with large amounts of capital flowing into BTC and ETH respectively, and market sentiment is extremely fearful. In terms of investment and financing, 13 transactions were completed with a total of $76.15 million, with infrastructure financing leading, and institutions accelerating their digital asset custody deployment.

Curve Finance has topped the GitHub development activity rankings among cryptocurrency governance projects, with both CRV implementations scoring 32.8 points. With a market cap of 19,283,746,565,748,392,010 million, it highlights strong development activity despite its 152nd global ranking.

The latest research report indicates that if Australia continues to slow down digital asset regulation, it could miss out on a $24 billion AUD opportunity. The report recommends establishing a regulatory sandbox to promote the development of tokenized financial markets and improve market efficiency and transparency. Lack of clear regulation could significantly reduce economic benefits, and Australia may lose its global competitive edge.

A16z Crypto criticizes that most virtual machines named "ZK" do not actually provide true zero-knowledge privacy protection, and points out that the misuse of terminology has become an issue. They introduced Jolt zkVM's new solution NovaBlindFold, which achieves real zero-knowledge privacy through the creation of "blind proofs" without the need for expensive packaging processes, meeting market demand for privacy solutions.

PANews March 4 News, according to Cointelegraph, a study by the Bitcoin Policy Institute on 36 cutting-edge AI models found that 48.3% of the models prefer Bitcoin as the primary monetary tool, rather than stablecoins or other forms of currency.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined the future development direction on social platform X, calling on blockchain developers to focus on "sanctuary technology," safeguarding privacy and digital autonomy, and denying blind imitation of large corporations' models. Vitalik advocates for Ethereum to create ownerless digital spaces, promote decentralization, emphasizing that the core value of technology lies in resisting external control and building a stable ecosystem.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of Near Protocol, predicts that AI agents will become the primary users of blockchain in the future, serving as the front end while blockchain acts as the invisible back end for online activities.

A16z Crypto releases a technical update, pointing out the industry's misuse of the "zero-knowledge" concept and emphasizing that a true zkVM must possess zero-knowledge properties, not just simplicity. As privacy demands increase, mixing concepts becomes problematic. A16z enhances the privacy capabilities of Jolt zkVM by introducing the NovaBlindFold folding scheme.