Bitcoin’s Ride Through Booms and Busts

The post Prediction markets, DATs, the fee switch, and Project Crypto appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. “If you can’t make money, you may want to consider being quiet. Maybe the market knows more than you do.” — Jeff Yass Today, The Breakdown looks at developing stories and links from around the cryptoverse. After Jeff Yass brought his math and poker skills onto trading floors in the 1980s, global options markets stopped looking like a casino and started looking like a science. Yass thinks prediction markets could do the same for the world. First and foremost, he says, “It will stop wars.” Yass cites the second Iraq War, which President Bush said would cost the US $20 billion but is now thought to have cost at least $2 trillion, and maybe as much as $6 trillion. It’s unlikely prediction markets would have settled on such an astronomical number, but Yass believes they might have predicted something like $500 billion, in which case “people might have said, ‘Look, we don’t want this war.’” That would have saved many, many lives, as well: “If people know how expensive it’s going to be and how disastrous it’s going to be, they’ll try to come up with other solutions.” Prediction markets, he says, “can really slow down the lies that politicians are constantly telling us.” He also cites applications in insurance, technology and even dating. Asked by the 16-year-old podcast host what advice he’d give young people, Yass suggested they could avoid relationship mistakes by creating an anonymous prediction market for their friends to bet on. “I believe in markets,” he concluded. It sounds like a dumb idea: Unlike stocks with their open-ended valuations, prediction markets should converge toward the single fixed probability of a binary outcome. But the author of No Dumb Ideas crunched the numbers and…

Every day after the presale auction goes live, the Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) ecosystem resets its clock. Every 24 hours, a new Initial Coin Auction (ICA) begins, 200 million tokens distributed proportionally among contributors, based entirely on the day’s total contributions. There are no private rounds, no insider discounts, and no whales buying their way [...] The post Zero Knowledge Proof Whitelist Open: How to Master The 24-Hour ICA Daily Token Distribution appeared first on Blockonomi.

The post U.S., Europe brands take on the Chinese consumer appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Pictured here is Louis Vuitton’s new cruise ship-shaped store in Shanghai, China, on June 28, 2025. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images BEIJING — China’s economic slowdown isn’t discouraging U.S. and European brands from revamping their strategies to reach Chinese shoppers. Instead, the allure of the world’s second-largest consumer market is forcing companies to adapt in the face of growing competition from local brands. In the case of Kraft Heinz, getting more people in China to buy ketchup this year also meant hiring a local agency to help create catchy campaigns — decorating subway station columns to mimic ketchup bottles and promoting the condiment as a fresh twist on a popular dish: stir-fried eggs and tomatoes. It’s a hard market to tackle, even for Shanghai-based marketing firm Good Idea Growth Network (GGN). The agency has witnessed at least five different waves of consumer trends in its 14-year history, founder Stephy Liu, said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. “The gameplay keeps on changing.” But GGN has succeeded even after rejecting an acquisition offer from British advertising giant WPP, Liu said, noting that about half of her clients are foreign brands. While Kraft Heinz isn’t done with its China ketchup campaign yet, the company reported second-quarter net sales in emerging markets climbed by 4.2% from a year ago, helping offset declines in North America. WPP explored a potential acquisition of GGN but did not end up going far in the process, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Kraft Heinz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Localized social media From Starbucks’ struggles to Lululemon’s successes in China, it’s become clear that the right mix of localization is essential. “Among international brands in China, the winners are often dedicating more than 40% of revenue to marketing, especially content and platform-first…