HashStack #007

January has been a month of rapid shifts—Bitcoin miners eye AI, Uniswap v4 is live, and DeepSeek-R1 is shaking up AI discussions. Meanwhile, stablecoins face regulatory challenges, and major fundraising rounds signal strong Web3 momentum. Here’s your TL;DR on what’s shaping the industry.

• Following last year’s Bitcoin halving event, coupled with a 3 month streak of declining Bitcoin network activity, more miners are looking for alternative revenue streams in AI/HPC. 

• The European Central Bank announced that Bitcoin will not be part of its central bank reserves due to concerns over liquidity, security and association with criminal activities. 

• Uniswap v4 is now live. 

• Injective rolls out native EVM support.

• Symbiotic mainnet goes live on Ethereum, packed with feature-complete capabilities powered by a slashing mechanism.  

• Hyperliquid’s HyperEVM will support a dual block architecture, decoupling block size and block speed by having two different mempools. 

• Ethereum Foundation set up a new ⅗ safe multisig wallet which will be used to manage capital deployment onchain, starting with Aave. 

• CoW DAO passed a proposal for revenue sharing.  

• Solana-based ridesharing app, Teleport, announced closure of its operations.

• Former SEC and CFTC chief economist released a report on the Solana ecosystem. It mentioned the strong technical architecture of Solana, and its potential for greater adoption from retail and institutional investors. 

• DeepSeek-R1 has sparked intense discussion over the past weeks, centering around how it achieves similar performance to OpenAI-o1, though at a much lower cost by using multi-head latent attention, a mixture of experts and multi-token predictions. 

• Myshell AI announced support and integration of DeepSeek-R1, enabling the creation of AI Agents powered by DeepSeek. 

• Arc partners with Solana Foundation to provide grants to developers who are building Rust-based agents powered by the RIG framework. 

• Alibaba released its newest multimodal LLM, Qwen 2.5-Max which outperforms DeepSeek V3 on various benchmarks. 

• OpenAI has also introduced its own version of an AI Agent, Operator, which is available to US Pro subscribers for now. Operator is able to perform multi-step online tasks on behalf of users by using chain-of-thought reasoning. 

• Virtuals Protocol announced its expansion into the Solana ecosystem. 

• Native USDC is now supported on Aptos.

• Crypto.com announced the delisting of USDT, with Kraken also set to follow. 

• Tether’s USDT returns to Lightning network and Bitcoin, supported by Taproot assets.

• Circle launched paymaster to enable gas payments in USDC on Arbitrum and Base. 

• Powered by Bridge, squad wallet users are now able to make USDC payments directly to the bank accounts of businesses and individuals. 

• Coinbase has acquired Spindl, the onchain ads and attribution platform, which will now be integrated with Base. 

• Sign announced a $16M fundraising round led by YZi Labs. 

• Irreducible completed a $24M Series A round, co-led by Paradigm and Bain Capital Crypto. 

• Paradigm led a $25M Series A round for D3 Global, a Web3 domain infrastructure firm.

• Humanity Protocol, a blockchain identity solution, has raised a $20M strategic funding led by Pantera Capital and Jump Crypto. 

• SignalPlus raised a $11M Series B round led by AppWorks and OKX Ventures. 

• Plume Network launches Plume Nexus, providing real-time onchain data integration. Plume also launched Plume SkyLink, an interoperability solution, powered by LayerZero to unlock multi-chain RWA yields. 

• LnFi Network announced availability of USDT on Bitcoin and Lightning Network. 

From scaling breakthroughs to AI innovation and shifting market dynamics, February is setting the stage for a stellar year in Web3.