Weekly Hot Project Updates: Ripple officially settles with the SEC, Sei developers propose to abandon Cosmos in favor of Ethereum, Treasure Chain to shut down at the end of the month, etc. (0503–0510)

1. Ripple and SEC have officially reached a settlement protocol, requesting the court to lift the injunction and allocate the fine amount link

According to the joint motion filed by Ripple and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, both parties have reached a settlement agreement and request the court to issue a declaratory judgment to terminate the injunction against Ripple and release the $125 million civil penalty in the escrow account. Under the agreement, Ripple will pay $50 million to the SEC, and the remaining amount will be returned to Ripple.

2. The Pump Fun weekly expense capture level has exceeded Ethereum link for 9 consecutive weeks.

Since the beginning of this year, the memecoin launcher Pumpfun on Solana has captured fees of $294 million, surpassing Ethereum's $249 million. Additionally, Pumpfun's weekly fee capture level has exceeded Ethereum for 9 consecutive weeks.

3. Optimism: The Isthmus hard fork has been activated, introducing the Superchain link with the Ethereum Pectra upgrade.

Optimism announced that it has successfully activated the Isthmus hard fork, introducing key features from the Ethereum Pectra upgrade into the OP Stack and Superchain. This upgrade comes just two days after Pectra went live on the Ethereum mainnet, and Superchain is the first L2 ecosystem to support the Pectra upgrade. The upgrade encompasses Base, Ink, OP Mainnet, Soneium, Unichain, and several other OP Stack chains.

4. Arbitrum DAO approves the use of 11.6 million USD ARB to invest in tokenized US Treasury bonds link

On May 8, Arbitrum DAO approved a STEP 2 diversification asset allocation proposal, allocating approximately 11.6 million USD of 35 million ARB to bond token products issued by Franklin Templeton (FOBXX), Spiko (USTBL), and WisdomTree (WTGXX), with proportions of 35%, 35%, and 30%, respectively.

5. Sei developers propose to abandon Cosmos support and fully transition to the Ethereum ecosystem link

Sei Network developers proposed to stop supporting Cosmos, citing the need to simplify architecture, reduce infrastructure complexity, and focus on building an ecosystem compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Currently, Sei supports both EVM and CosmWasm dual architecture, but if the proposal passes, it will only support EVM transactions in the future. The proposal is expected to be discussed at the community meeting on May 14.

6. ZKsync announced the achievement of full EVM equivalence, now live on the Era network link

ZKsync announced that it has achieved full EVM equivalence as part of the protocol version 27 upgrade, which is now live on the Era network and will subsequently be promoted to all ZK chains in the Elastic Network. Developers no longer need to use zkSolc, Foundry ZKsync, or hardhat-foundry, and can directly use standard solc, foundry, and hardhat tools for deployment. This upgrade has been approved through the governance proposal ZIP-9 and relevant development documentation has been released.

7. Celestia DA demand has doubled in the past 5 months link

Nick White from the Celestia team stated that the demand for Celestia DA has grown strongly, increasing twofold in the past 5 months; Turbotap has successfully achieved its throughput targets in its stress test network, and even without Turbotap data, the demand for Celestia DA is still twice what it was in December last year, with Celestia's DA market share remaining above 50%. Additionally, Nick White mentioned that Turbotap essentially incentivizes Eclipse and Celestia to fill transactions for testing these networks, rather than flooding them with fake data.

8. Doodles new token DOOD market value plummeted by 40% after airdrop link

The Ethereum-based NFT project Doodles airdropped DOOD tokens on the Solana network, causing its market value to plummet from over $100 million to about $60 million, a decline of 40%. The floor price of Doodles NFTs dropped from 3.5 ETH to less than 1.5 ETH, with an overall valuation shrinkage of nearly 60%. Doodles had previously announced the issuance of 10 billion DOOD tokens and plans to bridge to the Ethereum L2 network Base in the future.

9. EVM public chain project Shardeum announces the official launch of the mainnet link

EVM public chain project Shardeum announced the official launch of its mainnet. The previous testnet phase attracted over 1.4 million users and operated over 171,000 physical validator nodes. The launch of the mainnet marks Shardeum's transition from years of development to formal operation. The project will simultaneously initiate the Token Generation Event (TGE), with an initial circulation of 249 million SHM.

10. Treasure Chain will close on May 30, 2025 link

Treasure Chain will shut down on May 30, 2025. Asset holders must redeem all ETH, MAGIC, SMOL, and NFT holdings by the end of May. Previously, Treasure DAO announced a restructuring due to financial crisis and will terminate game operations and Treasure Chain.