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Pro-crypto Howard Lutnick confirmed as U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, the former CEO and Chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, has been approved by the U.S. Senate to head the Department of Commerce, according to Cointelegraph via X. Lutnick, known for his pro-crypto stance, is recognized as a big backer of Bitcoin $BTC and Tether $USDT. Last July at the Bitcoin Conference 2024, Lutnick announced a $2 billion financing initiative to provide leverage for BTC holders.

Sonic SVM, the first chain extension for Solana, has launched its $1 million Mobius Hackathon, inviting developers to build decentralized applications (dApps) on its gaming-optimized platform. The event, which begins on February 17 and runs until March 14, aims to accelerate innovation across multiple blockchain verticals, including gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), and artificial intelligence (AI). Hackathon Tracks and Judging Criteria According to a press statement shared with CryptoPotato, the hackathon will feature four distinct tracks: Attention Capital Market, DeFi, AI, and Gaming. Participants in the event will be tasked with creating apps that address specific needs within these categories. This will include content tokenization for social media platforms, yield-generating tools, AI agent aggregators, and high-revenue gaming experiences. Additionally, a panel of industry experts will evaluate submissions on the basis of their innovation, technical depth, and viability in the real world. The judges will also offer constructive feedback to help the participating teams refine their projects, ensuring they all gain valuable feedback from the experience. The experts are expected to share updates on social media, promoting standout entries in the hackathon to highlight the potential of Sonic’s ecosystem. Once the competition runs its course, they will assess final submissions and announce winners on April 2, with the $1 million prize pool distributed across the top projects. Sonic hopes the initiative will help accelerate the growth of its ecosystem, while demonstrating its ability to improve Solana’s scalability via a specialized high-performance layer. Sonic’s Framework and Recent Milestones The platform is built on HyperGrid, a horizontal scaling framework for orchestrating Solana rollups. It enables games to launch their own blockchain layers, which lets developers create highly customizable game economies. Last year, Sonic celebrated the success of its incentivized testnet called “Odyssey,” which saw more than 100,000 wallets connected to it and 17 million transactions performed on it. The launch of the hackathon comes on the back of reports that apps on Solana had generated 10 times more revenue than their Ethereum counterparts. Over a 24 hour period in mid-February, Solana apps raked in up to $8.4 million, dwarfing Ethereum’s $875,000. The trend was also witnessed in the network’s trading volume, where Solana recorded activity worth $5.39 billion compared to its bigger rival’s $2.14 billion. The post Sonic Kicks Off $1M Mobius Hackathon appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Bitwise donates $150K to support Bitcoin open source development Bitwise, a cryptocurrency asset management company and spot Bitcoin ( $BTC ) exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuer, announced via X that it is donating $150,000 to support Bitcoin open source developers. Bitwise explained that when it launched its spot Bitcoin ETF product (BITB), It announced that it would donate 10% of its total profits each year toward Bitcoin development. This is its first donation as part of that commitment. The company added that it plans to donate to organizations such as Brink, OpenSats and the Human Rights Foundation.

Bitwise donates $150K to support Bitcoin open source development Bitwise, a cryptocurrency asset management company and spot Bitcoin ( $BTC ) exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuer, announced via X that it is donating $150,000 to support Bitcoin open source developers. Bitwise…