Odaily News ETHGlobal held its latest hackathon after Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand last weekend, with 713 projects submitting applications. The judges included many crypto experts, such as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, and Base founder and head Jesse Pollak. The ten finalists selected by the judges focus on growing areas in the crypto space, including Meme coins, AI agents, DAO tools, and more. This hackathon offers a $750,000 prize pool, the largest in the history of ETHGlobal. Base core developer Will Binns wrote on X: "I am a judge for ETHGlobal, and among the hundreds of projects I follow, I see two distinct trends - tokenization and AI agents." A core focus area for the winning projects is games, which account for 4 of the top 10. One of the winners, Metaloot, is a Launchpad that aims to connect games to Flow, and other winners are games in their own right, such as LootGO featuring “walking to earn Memecoin hunts,” BubbleWars is a game designed for Telegram that leverages referrals on Ethereum, and Dark Factory “combines the exploration of Dark Forest with automation from Factorio.” Another area of focus is DAO tools, with MiniDAO being a tool to enable DAOs inside Telegram, where bots hold wallets controlled by group members, and DAOGenie leveraging AI agents to “automatically make purchases, send donations, process communications, and perform other tasks” based on DAO votes. Another winner, Industry.ai, also leverages AI agents, where four specialized AI agents collaborate to handle complex blockchain operations. The remaining projects cover a wide range of areas from infrastructure to DeSci, with Zubernetes providing "a distributed system for orchestrating secure containerized workloads with ZK proof verification"; ETHPark-QR allows Thai users to pay QR code parking tickets even without a local Thai bank account; finally, Cat in a Box provides users with a platform to securely share private data and participate in decentralized scientific experiments called DeSci. ETHGlobal's next hackathon will be held in Taipei in April 2025 with ETHTaipei. (The Block)

Odaily News Direxion has launched two high-risk leveraged cryptocurrency ETFs: Direxion Daily Crypto Industry Bull 2X Shares (ticker: LMBO) and Direxion Daily Crypto Industry Bear 1X Shares (ticker: REKT). Leveraged exchange-traded funds, such as Direxion's latest, use financial derivatives and debt to amplify the daily returns of underlying securities. Traditional ETFs typically track the securities in their underlying index on a one-to-one basis, while leveraged funds may target a 2:1 (or higher) ratio. "Crypto stocks are among the fastest growing companies in the world and currently represent a nearly $3 trillion asset class," said Edward Egilinsky, managing director of Direxion. "LMBO and REKT provide traders with concentrated investment opportunities to express their short-term confidence in companies building the future of the crypto-driven, decentralized economy."

Odaily News ETF issuer Direxion announces the launch of Direxion Daily Crypto Industry Bull 2X Shares (ticker: LMBO) and Direxion Daily Crypto Industry Bear 1X Shares (ticker: REKT). LMBO and REKT seek to achieve daily investment results of 200% or 100% of the performance of the Solactive Distributed Ledger and Decentralized Payment Technology Index, respectively, before fees and expenses. The index is designed to track the performance of U.S.-listed securities operating in the distributed ledger or decentralized payment technology sectors, including the following business sectors: blockchain technology, NFTs, decentralized finance, and digital asset mining hardware.

Odaily News Hypersonic Laboratories, the company behind the metaverse platform HELIX, announced the completion of a $7 million Series A financing round, led by Play Ventures, with participation from AppWorks, WTIC, KB Investment and Alex Ekvall. The new funds will be used for the further development of Helix, which is expected to launch a closed alpha test version later this year to facilitate the creation of role-playing game mods and servers. According to previous news, Hypersonic Laboratories completed a $3.5 million Pre-Seed round of financing in 2022, led by Play Ventures, with participation from Samsung Next, GSR, Third Kind, Alex Chung (founder of Giphy) and Scott Belsky (founder of Behance). (gamesindustry)

Odaily News In the Singapore Token2049 Ecosystem and Industry Growth: Envisioning the Decade Ahead for Crypto OKX Mainstage roundtable discussion, Islamic Coin co-founder Mohammed AlKaff Alhashmi said that Islamic Coin will conduct ethical inspections on the project. He stated that Islamic Coin puts the community first and for this the ethical part of the project will be examined. First, the token does not charge interest without your knowledge. Secondly, it does not allow any negative projects to be run. Mohammed explained that Islamic financial solutions are transparent to the Muslim community, and for this reason Islamic Coin is designing smart contracts to facilitate Islamic lending. He also said this could create a $3 trillion market. (Odaily reporter reported on the spot)

Odaily News: Encrypted asset management company Bitwise Asset Management has announced that the assets under management (AUM) of the Bitwise Crypto Industry Innovators ETF (NYSE: BITQ) have recently surpassed $100 million. As of June 30th, the price of Bitcoin has risen over 83% since the beginning of the year, and BITQ has seen a growth of over 135% during the same period. (Businesswire)

Odaily News: The Blockchain Association, a lobbying group for the cryptocurrency industry in the United States, has written a letter to the Office of the Inspector General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), requesting an investigation into the cryptocurrency company Prometheum. In a letter dated July 12th, the Blockchain Association requested the SEC Inspector General, Deborah Jeffrey, to investigate the approval of Prometheum's Special Purpose Broker-Dealer (SPBD) license by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). The organization also questioned the manner in which the company's Co-CEO, Aaron Kaplan, obtained a seat in the hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services in June. The organization expressed concerns about the fact that Prometheum was able to obtain the SPBD license in May 2023, given the uncertainty surrounding U.S. securities laws applicable to cryptocurrency companies. According to the Blockchain Association, Prometheum changed its publicly stated position calling for clear regulations from the SEC in April 2021, claiming that there were "clear paths to digital asset registration and legislation is unnecessary." (Cointelegraph) On July 11th, Senator Tuberville wrote an open letter to the U.S. Attorney General, Merrick Garland, and SEC Chairman, Gary Gensler, requesting an investigation into the Special Purpose Broker-Dealer, Prometheum, which recently obtained federal licensing to provide cryptocurrency trading services.

Odaily News -- U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand reintroduced the "Responsible Financial Innovation Act." The bill proposes that cryptocurrency exchanges be regulated by the CFTC, with the SEC taking a secondary role, and that all stablecoin issuers be regulated depository institutions. Last year's initial bipartisan bill did not make significant progress, and the intentions of key figures such as Sherrod Brown, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and Democratic Senator from Ohio, remain unclear this year. The key content of the bill is to delineate the boundaries between securities regulation and other regulatory objects. In broad terms, assets that do not bring economic benefits to investors should not be considered securities, even if they "benefit from entrepreneurial and managerial efforts that determine the value of the assets." Companies issuing cryptocurrencies will be required to disclose to the SEC twice a year, but they will not be subject to SEC influence as long as their tokens do not represent debt or equity, or other ownership, unless the agency prevails in the court challenge outlined in the bill. For now, the bill will place most cryptocurrencies under the CFTC's commodity domain and give the agency authority over crypto transactions. However, both the SEC and CFTC will receive equal amounts of funding ($500 million) and have equal power within a new self-regulatory organization (SRO). Establishing such an intermediary entity, similar to the National Futures Association or the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for the securities industry, remains controversial. Essentially, Lummis and Gillibrand propose creating an independent organization to manage industry standards and enforce penalties for misconduct. In this case, it is described as a "consumer protection and market integrity authority." The bill will also require full segregation of client assets and implement new risk management standards for crypto lending, completely banning rehypothecation, whereby crypto companies utilize client assets to expand their credit. Lummis and Gillibrand have also pushed for a definition of DeFi, which sets strict rules for when software projects veer into more centralized business operations and when they need to register as exchanges. (CoinDesk) In previous news, U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand will reintroduce their "Responsible Financial Innovation Act" as discussions about the future of digital asset regulation continue in the U.S. Congress. Lummis stated, "This legislation is the most comprehensive proposal to date, providing strong consumer protection and appropriately addressing the current state of cryptocurrency assets." The bill aims to address key issues such as market structure, stablecoin regulation, and taxation. Lummis and Gillibrand first introduced the bill in June 2022.

Odaily News, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) of Japan has announced a partnership with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to jointly regulate and pilot test the "Project Guardian" digital asset initiative in Singapore. At this stage, the FSA's participation will be limited to an observer role. The project aims to test the feasibility of digital technology applications such as asset tokenization while managing risks to financial stability and integrity. The current industry pilot includes fixed income, forex, as well as asset and wealth management. Project Guardian was established by MAS in May 2022 to test the feasibility of asset tokenization and DeFi applications in accordance with appropriate regulations. The project focuses on four areas: open and interoperable networks, trust anchors, asset tokenization, and institutional-grade DeFi protocols. In one project under the initiative, DBS Bank, JPMorgan, and SBI Digital Asset Holdings conducted forex and government bond transactions on a liquidity pool consisting of tokenized Singapore government bonds, Japanese government bonds, Japanese yen (JPY), and Singapore dollar (SGD) (Cointelegraph). According to previous reports, MAS has proposed an open and interoperable network framework designed for digital assets. The network was developed in collaboration with experts from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Payments and Market Infrastructures Committee (CPMI). Additionally, MAS announced the expansion of Project Guardian to test the potential of asset tokenization in more financial asset categories. To support this work, MAS has established the Project Guardian Industry Group consisting of 11 financial institutions, which will lead the pilot testing in asset and wealth management, fixed income, and forex industries.

Odaily News: The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has released a report outlining an open and interoperable network framework for digital assets. This network was developed in collaboration with experts from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI). Additionally, MAS has announced the expansion of Project Guardian to explore the potential of asset tokenization in additional financial asset classes. To support this initiative, MAS has formed the Project Guardian Industry Group consisting of 11 financial institutions, which will lead pilot projects in asset and wealth management, fixed income, and forex industries. According to previous reports, MAS published a whitepaper proposing a common framework to regulate the use of digital currencies, including central bank digital currencies, tokenized bank deposits, and stablecoins on distributed ledgers. The whitepaper, which was developed in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Korea, financial institutions, and fintech companies, outlines the technical specifications for the lifecycle of purpose-built tokens (PBM) from issuance to redemption, as well as protocols for interfacing with digital currencies.