#Gate广场四月发帖挑战 Web3 Today Must-Read | April 11

Today’s Quick Overview
• BitMine listed on the NYSE, holding 4.8 million ETH.
• Lummis warns: If crypto legislation fails, it will be frozen for four years.
• U.S. government transfers $150 million worth of BTC to Coinbase.
• Iran plans to collect transit fees from Bitcoin oil tankers to evade sanctions.
• Circle refuses to freeze hacker funds, clarifying the boundaries of authority.
• CFTC forms a pioneering team for AI and crypto regulation.
• a16z: Perpetual contracts are reconstructing global trading logic.
• U.S. Treasury includes blockchain companies in cybersecurity defenses.
• Hyperliquid’s daily trading volume surpasses 8 billion USD, hitting a new high.
• TON speeds up tenfold, cutting fees to target Solana users.

Today’s Analysis
Stop focusing on the small fluctuations in the market chart; the true “Giant Spirit” is reshaping the entire market’s foundation in a nearly brutal way. BitMine listing on the NYSE and disclosing holdings of 4.8 million ETH—what does this number mean? It directly locks in 4% of Ethereum’s total supply.
In simple terms, BitMine is the Ethereum version of MicroStrategy, but with more aggressive tactics—directly writing the “5% alchemy” into its buyback plan. The clearest signal behind this: Ethereum’s pricing power is shifting from retail investors and protocol developers at an unprecedented speed toward Wall Street’s balance sheets. When such large institutions start playing “drain the pond” in the open market, the narrative of Ethereum’s inflation or deflation becomes irrelevant; what matters is that it is turning into a scarce resource monopolized by institutions.

Interestingly, this wave of “institutionalization” is coinciding with a “sovereignization” struggle at a crossroads. Iran plans to collect Bitcoin transit fees through the Strait of Hormuz, which sounds like a provocation against the existing US dollar settlement system, but essentially is a final stress test of Bitcoin as a “geopolitical hard currency.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. government is transferring large amounts of seized Bitcoin on-chain, triggering market panic, while Senator Lummis warns that legislation could stall. This stark contrast between the administrative “sell-off inertia” and legislative “urgency” exposes Washington’s deep rift over crypto assets as strategic reserves.
If the CLARITY bill is truly frozen until 2030 as warned, then this power transfer in financial hegemony could evolve into an uncontrolled, savage growth in the regulatory vacuum.

The real highlight is hidden in the “power shift” of infrastructure. Circle’s refusal to freeze $275 million in hacker funds is not due to “kindness,” but a red line drawn between compliance pressure and decentralization faith.
Circle understands that if stablecoin issuers can arbitrarily act as judges, the trust cornerstone of on-chain finance will collapse. This restraint instead boosts protocols like Hyperliquid, whose daily trading volume exceeds $8.2 billion and is approaching centralized exchanges, indicating liquidity is rapidly fleeing constrained walls. Meanwhile, the “involution” on public chains has entered a red-hot stage. TON announces a tenfold speed increase and significant fee reductions, targeting Solana’s territory. This technological arms race, combined with a16z’s positioning of perpetual contracts as core DeFi infrastructure, suggests that the next bull market engine will no longer be simple “dumb tokens” or “little pictures,” but a hardcore financial foundation capable of supporting sovereign-level settlement and high-frequency trading.

Ultimately, when blockchain companies are officially incorporated into the U.S. Treasury’s national cybersecurity plan, the industry has bid farewell to the wild west era. The current game is simple: either become the rule-maker or be locked into the asset-liability sheet as liquidity fuel by institutions.