While crypto enthusiasts are focusing their attention on the massive event TOKEN2049 Singapore this week, crypto companies are expanding their partnerships and announcing various innovations. Find out more in today’s crypto news digest.
Circle Has Started Cooperation with Sony Block Solutions Labs
On 15 September, USDC stablecoin issuer Circle and Sony Block Solutions Labs announced a strategic collaboration to integrate and deploy the stablecoin on Sony’s Ethereum L2 blockchain, Soneium.
According to Circle’s press release, the partnership is aimed at creating a bridged USDC as the main token for value exchange in Soneium using the Circle Bridged USDC Standard. This specification allows an intermediate form of USDC to be deployed on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)—compliant blockchains, serving as a proxy for native USDC stored on Ethereum.
The collaboration “aligns ideally with our vision of creating a more interconnected and efficient digital ecosystem,” as stated by Sony Block Solutions Labs chief Jun Watanabe.
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“This collaboration marks a significant milestone for Circle’s mission to accelerate the adoption of our stablecoins and blockchain technology and empower creators to flourish through secure, user-friendly Web3 experiences,” said Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire.
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NEAR Protocol Integrates with Nillion Network
NEAR Protocol, a decentralized blockchain designed for developing and running applications, has announced its integration with Nillion Network, a privacy-focused computing platform. The main goal of this strategic integration is to improve privacy tools that will allow developers to work better in the DeFi space.
“This collaboration is about expanding what’s possible on NEAR and empowering developers to create solutions that are not only powerful but also privacy-preserving,” Alex Page, CEO of Nillion, said in a statement.
According to Page, Nillion is a distributed network built for general-purpose computing and data processing that helps scale blockchain and other applications. In other words, its privacy tools allow developers to take computing tasks off-chain – thereby opening up ‘design space’ for what is possible with blockchain. This is particularly true of the artificial intelligence experiments being conducted on NEAR. A significant number of decentralized AI projects are using NEAR, as the protocol’s founder, Illia Polosukhin, helped create the open-source machine learning platform Tensorflow. According to him, he wants the protocol to become a home for user-owned AI’.
ICP to Host Chain Fusion Hub @ Token2049
The decentralized blockchain network Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) announced on 16 September that it will hold a Chain Fusion Hub @ Token2049 as part of the large-scale TOKEN2049 event in Singapore. The hub will take place on 19 and 20 September at the Fullerton Hotel Singapore.
Over two days, ICP and its partners will host a series of events with the participation of leading figures, institutions, and projects in the field. Among them are Dominic Williams (DFINITY), Michael Terpin (Transform Ventures), Sunny Aggarwal (Osmosis), Francesca Puricelli (UNDP), NewTribe Capital, Cointelegraph, Omnity Network, and many others who will take part in discussions at the forefront of Web3 and AI technologies. According to ICP, Chain Fusion Hub is a high-profile platform for important discussions in the field of interconnectivity and interoperability.
TOKEN2049 is an annual conference that takes place in Dubai and Singapore and brings together founders and executives from leading Web3 companies. The event is currently taking place from 16 to 22 September in Singapore at Marina Bay Sands ahead of the 2024 Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix, with 20,000 attendees from over 150 countries and over 200 speakers. The conference will host at least 500 side events throughout the week.
According to the conference program, this year’s event will be attended not only by executives from Web3, artificial intelligence, finance, and technology companies but also by Formula 1 drivers and pop culture representatives. In addition, the organizers noted the presence of a large number of partners, including Gnosis Pay, MANTRA Chain, Telos Foundation, 1inch, and others, as well as crypto exchanges BingX, WhiteBIT, OKX, Coinbase, which will present their latest innovations at the event.
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ChatGPT Congratulated the User on the First Day of Study on its Own
A user on Reddit claimed that ChatGPT was able to calculate the start date of his studies and congratulated him on the first day of school. According to the user under the nickname SentuBill, the chatbot expressed a desire to celebrate this event on its own.
According to the available information, the AI-powered program was able to make a conclusion about the start of school based on the information received earlier. The chatbot analyzed previous conversations and was able to determine the right day for congratulations.
When the circumstances of this situation were clarified, ChatGPT informed the user that the new features were part of a recent update. It was a new large language model (LLM) called o1.
On 13 September 2024, OpenAI introduced a new version of its chatbot. In its blog post, the company wrote that it has trained its product to ‘spend more time thinking before they respond’. According to the developers, this model is much more efficient at solving STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) tasks and is also better at coding.
A Strategic Collaboration of Fireblocks and Chainlink
On 17 September, Fireblocks, a crypto custody and services company, announced a collaboration with Chainlink Labs to offer banks a new solution for issuing and managing stablecoins. According to the press release, the strategic collaboration will support end-to-end tokenization capabilities for stablecoin issuers, including minting, storage, and distribution, among other services.
Both parties anticipate that the partnership “will not only provide stablecoin users with real-time visibility into asset reserves but also elevate the utility of the stablecoin as a secure payment vehicle and institutional trading instrument in digital asset markets,” according to Angie Walker, Head of Banking and Capital Markets at Chainlink Labs.
Offering issuing agents a “single, comprehensive, real-time view of stablecoins, reserves, market value, and total supply, including across different blockchains” is the aim of the collaborative endeavor. It is not yet known which banks will start issuing stablecoins, but both firms have previously supported Wenia, a division of Colombia’s largest bank Bancolombia, in launching the COPW stablecoin.
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Vladislav Hryniv
Vladislav Hryniv is a digital journalist. For several years, he has worked as a copywriter for Web3 companies, where he gained interest in the industry. Currently, he writes articles on blockchain technology, finance, statistics, and digital asset analytics for various publications.