Industry News

Tracks company news, strategic changes, funding activities, and personnel adjustments across the blockchain and crypto industries, delivering a full-spectrum industry overview for our users.

More and More 'Model Supermarkets' Are Opening: ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent Compete to Integrate

Chinese tech giants like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent are accelerating the rollout of integrated AI model subscription services—dubbed “model supermarkets”—to provide developers with bundled access to multiple leading domestic large language models (LLMs). ByteDance’s Volcengine recently upgraded its "Coding Plan" by adding newer models like GLM-5.1, Minimax M2.7, and Kimi k2.6, allowing subscribers to use various top models under a single monthly fee starting at ¥40. However, user feedback reveals significant issues, including rapid consumption of usage limits (e.g., hitting caps within hours), frequent server errors (like HTTP 429), and slow response times during peak hours. Complaints about misleading deduction rates—where calls to advanced models consume more quota—are also common. The trend is industry-wide: Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have all launched similar multi-model coding plans. While these platforms reduce trial costs for developers, they also expose challenges in balancing affordability with service quality and computational stability. Amid this shift, independent AI companies like Zhipu, MiniMax, and Moonlight Face (Kimi) are developing strategies to avoid becoming mere “pipes” in this ecosystem—focusing on vertical applications, autonomous agents, and long-context models to retain competitiveness. Analysts suggest that, while platform aggregation may pressure model firms in the short term, specialized and vertical AI capabilities will remain differentiated in the long run.

marsbit04/24 04:07

More and More 'Model Supermarkets' Are Opening: ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent Compete to Integrate

marsbit04/24 04:07

Silicon Valley Godfather Naval Takes the Helm, AngelList Packs Pre-IPO Growth Companies into USVC Fund

This article discusses the USVC Venture Capital Access Fund (USVC), a new investment vehicle co-founded by prominent Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant through AngelList. The fund's core mission is to provide retail investors access to high-growth, pre-IPO companies—a segment of the market traditionally reserved for venture capitalists and accredited investors. USVC invests in a portfolio of late-stage private companies, including notable names like xAI, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Its key selling point is allowing ordinary investors to gain exposure to the significant value creation that occurs before a company goes public, as the average age of companies at IPO has increased from 6 years in 1980 to 13 years today. However, the article highlights several important constraints: investors buy fund shares, not direct stock; the fund carries a net annual fee of 2.5%; it offers limited liquidity through quarterly share repurchases; and investments are long-term with no fixed end date. The fund has also garnered attention in the Web3 community due to Naval’s and AngelList’s history of supporting crypto and blockchain projects, positioning USVC at the intersection of traditional venture capital and emerging digital asset investment trends.

marsbit04/24 02:46

Silicon Valley Godfather Naval Takes the Helm, AngelList Packs Pre-IPO Growth Companies into USVC Fund

marsbit04/24 02:46

Aave Is Surrendering the Throne of DeFi Lending Due to Its Own Stupidity

An article titled "Aave Is Giving Up Its Throne in DeFi Lending Due to Its Own Foolishness" discusses how Aave mishandled a crisis following a $292 million hack of rsETH from Kelp DAO, leading to significant outflows and reputational damage. After the hack, Aave failed to promptly reassure users or commit to covering potential bad debt—estimated between $123.7 million and $230.1 million—despite having sufficient reserves. This hesitation triggered panic, resulting in $17.2 billion in outflows and liquidity crises across multiple pools. The author argues that Aave’s poor crisis management and reluctance to act quickly exacerbated the situation, damaging its reputation as the "safest DeFi" platform. Meanwhile, competitor Spark, a fork of Aave V3, capitalized on the situation by attracting fleeing funds, growing its TVL by nearly $2 billion. Spark had previously delisted rsETH, avoiding any exposure to the hack. Its proactive communication and strategic positioning contrast sharply with Aave’s delayed response. Although Aave’s founder later announced a relief plan (DeFi United) with multiple partners and a personal donation, the damage to user trust and liquidity may be lasting. The article concludes that Aave’s missteps have allowed competitors like Spark, Morpho, and Jupiter Lend to challenge its dominant position in DeFi lending.

marsbit04/24 02:40

Aave Is Surrendering the Throne of DeFi Lending Due to Its Own Stupidity

Aave, a leading DeFi lending protocol, is facing a severe crisis and losing its dominant market position due to its poor handling of a recent security incident. The crisis began when Kelp DAO suffered a hack resulting in a loss of $292 million in rsETH. In the aftermath, approximately $17.2 billion in funds flowed out of Aave as user panic escalated. The article criticizes Aave's crisis management as "extremely foolish." Instead of promptly offering reassurance or committing to cover the potential bad debt—estimated between $123.7 million and $230.1 million, which Aave could have afforded—the protocol initially deflected blame, emphasizing that its code was not at fault. This delay and lack of a clear guarantee led to widespread user anxiety, triggering a bank run-like scenario where users withdrew funds or borrowed aggressively from other pools, causing liquidity shortages. Meanwhile, Aave’s competitor Spark—a fork of Aave’s own code—has benefited significantly. Having removed support for rsETH months earlier, Spark avoided any losses from the incident and has since seen its TVL grow by nearly $2 billion, attracting major deposits such as over $1.24 billion from Justin Sun. Spark has actively capitalized on the situation, publicly criticizing Aave’s security reputation. Although Aave’s founder Stani eventually announced a relief plan named "DeFi United" with several partners and a personal donation, the damage to user trust and capital outflows may be irreversible. The article concludes that Aave is losing its throne in DeFi lending to aggressive competitors like Spark, Morpho, and Jupiter Lend.

Odaily星球日报04/24 02:38

OpenAI Launches Workflow Agent, GPTs Begin Countdown

OpenAI has launched Workspace Agents, an evolution of GPTs designed for teams. This new feature allows users to create reusable, shareable agents that automate repetitive workflows. Driven by Codex, these agents operate within their own workspace, can access files, call tools, and run continuously in the background. Users describe a workflow—such as collecting information, making judgments, generating results, and sending outputs—to ChatGPT, which then builds the agent. The entire team can use and refine the agent via ChatGPT or Slack. Once set up, the agent runs autonomously. Workspace Agents are team-shared, code-free, and manageable with predefined permissions and controls. They are suitable for structured, repeatable tasks involving multiple tools and continuous operation, such as software review, feedback整理, report generation, sales follow-up, and risk assessment. The system operates within clear rules, with sensitive actions requiring human confirmation. It aims to transform workflows from being person-dependent to being documented, executable, and reusable—akin to scientific management principles. Competing solutions from Microsoft and Google are also emerging in this space.

marsbit04/24 00:50

OpenAI Launches Workflow Agent, GPTs Begin Countdown

marsbit04/24 00:50

Sentora and Firelight Collaborate to Bring Native DeFi Coverage

Sentora, an institutional DeFi intelligence platform, and Firelight Protocol have partnered to integrate native coverage for Sentora’s public and private vaults. This collaboration introduces a capital-backed protection layer designed to facilitate institutional participation by offering defense against risks like smart contract exploits, oracle failures, and bad debt. The integration addresses a key structural gap in DeFi, where security concerns have limited institutional adoption. Firelight, built on Flare Network, uses FXRP—a 1:1 representation of XRP—as primary collateral, enabling XRP to function as a yield-bearing asset while diversifying the reserve base. The partnership aims to standardize embedded protection within DeFi capital deployment, combining Sentora’s risk models with Firelight’s automated claims and underwriting systems. Flare, a strategic investor in Sentora, supports the alignment of infrastructure and risk layers. Together, the collaboration seeks to enhance trust and accelerate broader institutional adoption of onchain finance.

TheNewsCrypto04/23 14:02

Sentora and Firelight Collaborate to Bring Native DeFi Coverage

TheNewsCrypto04/23 14:02

GSR Launches Multi-Asset Crypto ETF With Staking Yields

GSR, an institutional crypto trading platform, has launched its first crypto exchange-traded fund, the Crypto Core3 ETF (BESO), which began trading on Nasdaq. The fund provides exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana and offers staking yields, along with a dynamic allocation strategy to maximize returns. On its first trading day, BESO saw approximately $4.8 million in activity. The ETF charges a 1% management fee and will rebalance its allocations weekly based on research-driven signals. GSR, founded by ex-Goldman Sachs traders, aims to reach more investors through this entry into the crypto ETF market, which has seen growing interest from major financial firms like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

TheNewsCrypto04/23 11:36

GSR Launches Multi-Asset Crypto ETF With Staking Yields

TheNewsCrypto04/23 11:36

Yao Shunyu's 88 Days

Yao Shunyu, a 27-year-old AI expert with a background from Princeton and OpenAI, joined Tencent in September 2025. Within 88 days, he led a major overhaul of Tencent’s AI strategy and organization, resulting in the release of Hunyuan Hy3 preview—a MoE model with 295B total parameters and 21B active parameters, supporting up to 256K context length. The launch came after Tencent leadership, including CEO Ma Huateng and President Martin Lau, openly criticized Hunyuan's earlier underperformance—citing slow development, over-reliance on superficial benchmark optimization, and poor generalization in real-world applications. Internal adoption was low, with key business units like WeChat and gaming seeking external AI solutions. Yao reshaped Tencent’s AI approach by integrating previously siloed teams, dissolving the ten-year-old Tencent AI Lab, and establishing new units focused on AI infrastructure and data. Hy3 preview was developed using co-design principles, closely aligned with product teams to ensure practical usability from the start. It has already been integrated into core products like Yuanbao, QQ, and enterprise tools. The release signals a shift from chasing rankings to building usable, scalable AI grounded in Tencent’s ecosystem. While external partnerships (like with DeepSeek and OpenClaw) helped retain users temporarily, the focus is now on making Hunyuan a reliable internal foundation. The real test lies in sustaining this new organizational momentum amid fierce competition from Alibaba, DeepSeek, and others.

marsbit04/23 11:13

marsbit04/23 11:13

Exploring Physical World AGI with "Visual Reasoning", ElorianAI Raises $55 Million

ElorianAI, co-founded by ex-Google AI expert Andrew Dai and former AI specialist Yinfei Yang, has raised $55 million in early funding to develop next-generation AI systems with advanced visual reasoning capabilities. While current large models excel in text-based tasks like programming and math, they perform poorly in visual reasoning—even top models like Gemini only match a 3-year-old’s ability in basic visual benchmarks. The key limitation lies in the architecture of current vision-language models (VLMs), which first convert visual inputs into text before reasoning, losing critical spatial and structural information. ElorianAI aims to build a native multimodal model that processes and reasons directly in visual space, enabling deeper understanding of physical relationships, constraints, and environments. The company plans to release a state-of-the-art visual reasoning model by 2026, with potential applications in robotics, disaster management, engineering, healthcare, and AI hardware. By using high-quality, diverse, and synthetically generated data, ElorianAI intends to create models that don’t just perceive but truly understand and reason about the physical world—bringing us closer to visual AGI.

marsbit04/23 10:10

Exploring Physical World AGI with "Visual Reasoning", ElorianAI Raises $55 Million

marsbit04/23 10:10

20 Billion Valuation, Alibaba and Tencent Competing to Invest, Whose Money Will Liang Wenfeng Take?

DeepSeek, an AI startup founded by Liang Wenfeng, is reportedly in talks with Alibaba and Tencent for an external funding round that could value the company at over $20 billion. This marks a significant shift, as DeepSeek had previously relied solely on funding from its parent company,幻方量化 (Huanfang Quantitative), and had resisted external investment. The potential valuation would place DeepSeek among the top-tier AI model companies in China, comparable to competitors like MoonDark (valued at ~$18 billion) and ahead of recently listed firms like MiniMax and Zhipu. The funding—which could range from $600 million (for a 3% stake) to $2 billion (for 10%)—is seen as a move to secure resources for model development, retain talent, and support infrastructure needs, particularly as competition in inference models and AI agents intensifies. Both Alibaba and Tencent are eager to invest, not only for financial returns but also to integrate DeepSeek into their broader AI ecosystems. However, DeepSeek’s leadership is cautious about maintaining independence and may prefer financial investors over strategic ones to avoid being locked into a specific tech ecosystem. Alternative options, such as state-backed funds, offer longer-term capital and policy support but may come with slower decision-making and potential constraints on global expansion. With competing AI firms accelerating their IPO plans, DeepSeek’s window for securing optimal terms may be narrowing. The final decision will reflect a trade-off between capital, resources, and strategic independence.

marsbit04/23 09:53