News

PANews, January 8th – According to The Block, the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced that former CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam and Robinhood Chief Legal Officer Dan Gallagher have joined its board of directors. Both are prominent figures in the field of crypto policy.

BlockBeats News, January 8th, according to sources cited by the media, the developer of the chatbot Claude, Anthropic, plans to raise $100 billion at a pre-investment valuation of $350 billion, nearly twice the valuation four months ago. Sources said Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management plan to lead this round of financing. This is the third "super financing" in the past year, with the company having completed a $13 billion investment in September last year, valuing it at $183 billion. The current round of financing is expected to be completed in the next few weeks, and the final deal size may still change. One source said that this new funding is additional to the $15 billion that Nvidia and Microsoft plan to invest in this OpenAI competitor. As part of this collaboration, Anthropic said it will purchase $30 billion in computing power from Microsoft Azure, which will run on Nvidia's AI system.

 on Wednesday, Ethereum completed the second and final "Blob Parameters Only (BPO)" fork in this round of upgrade plans. This fork not only improved data availability but also demonstrated how the network can roll out smaller-scale updates in phases. Ethereum's official X account wrote: "Compared to waiting for a major upgrade once a year to adjust network capacity, the BPO fork allows Ethereum to independently and efficiently fine-tune specific parameters (such as the blob target value). This gradual scaling approach enables the network to safely test higher loads step by step." Blobs are temporary large data blocks introduced in Ethereum's 2024 Dencun upgrade, mainly used by layer 2 rollups to batch transactions onto the mainnet at a low cost. These data storages (full name Binary Large OBjects) are retained for 18 days and then permanently deleted. Among the 13 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) included in Fusaka, a considerable portion focuses on improving Ethereum's data availability layer. The most important is the upgrade to PeerDAS, allowing nodes to confirm blob data by verifying smaller data samples. Additionally, the BPO mechanism was introduced to gradually expand the upper limit of blobs. The first BPO fork was activated on December 9 (about a week after Fusaka went live), increasing the target blob count per block from 6 to 10, and the maximum limit from 9 to 15. The upgrade on Wednesday further raised the target value to 14 and the maximum limit to 21.