March brought a wave of momentum across crypto—from headline-worthy announcements to deep technical progress. The U.S. government officially entered the digital asset arena with Trump’s launch of a Strategic Crypto Reserve, featuring BTC, ETH, and other major tokens. On the institutional side, Circle joined the IPO race alongside Kraken and Gemini, signaling growing public market appetite for crypto-native companies. Maven 11 also announced the launch of Fund III, continuing our commitment to backing visionary builders shaping the decentralized future.
Ethereum's Pectra upgrade successfully launched on the Sepolia testnet this month, following the initial testing phase on the Holesky testnet. The Pectra upgrade is designed to improve UX in crypto wallets, account abstraction, and increased validator stakes and blob counts for better scalability. Previously on the Holesky testnet, Pectra faced issues with deposit contract addresses affecting finality, whereas on Sepolia they successfully achieved finality. However, a new problem related to execution layer transaction inclusion occurred, which led to empty blocks. To address these issues, a new Ethereum testnet called Hoodi was launched to facilitate the final testing of the Pectra upgrade. Mainnet deployment is under review together with a potential hard-fork anticipated in the second quarter. Furthermore, the Solana proposal SIMD-0228 came to a vote this month without a successful quorum. SIMD-0228 was aimed to significantly reduce the network's inflation rate by transitioning to a dynamic, market-driven emission model, where the annual rate of inflation would drop from 4.7% to below 1%. The failure to pass was mainly due to concerns from smaller validators who feared that reduced staking rewards would threaten their financial viability and potentially push them out of the network.
President Donald Trump announced the U.S. Strategic Crypto Reserve including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP, Solana (SOL), and Cardano (ADA), as part of an effort to establish a national cache of major digital assets. Executive orders were signed for this initiative, aimed at bolstering the country's position in the global cryptocurrency landscape. Additionally, Trump spoke at the Digital Asset Summit in NYC, where he addressed the significance of integrating digital assets into the current financial system. On top of that, Trump is collaborating with Hut 8 and launched ‘American Bitcoin’, a new venture focused on industrial-scale Bitcoin mining and strategic reserve development. GameStop also updated its investment policy to incorporate Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset and announced a private offering of $1.3 billion in convertible senior notes, which will be used to purchase Bitcoin.
The SEC continues easing off crypto-related companies as they now announced to be dropping the lawsuit against Cumberland DRW for trading securities without a broker-dealer license. On top of that, the SEC also agreed to drop the lawsuit against Kraken for operating as an unregistered exchange. Further news about Kraken is they announced buying NinjaTrader (a US futures broker) for $1.5 billion to enter the US crypto futures market. Also, Kraken said to seek an IPO as soon as Q1 next year which seems to be a new trend for exchanges in this industry. This pattern continues as USDC issuer Circle, also filed for an IPO, planning to list its Class A common stock on the NYSE with a targeted valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion. Major financial institutions like JPMorgan, Citi, and Oppenheimer are underwriting the IPO, with Circle potentially making its market debut as early as June. And lastly, Gemini, the major Winklevoss twins backed crypto exchange, is said to have filed confidentially for an IPO. In other regulatory adjustments, Binance delisted all non-MiCA compliant stablecoin trading pairs for users within the European Economic Area (EEA). At the same time, Thailand deregulated stablecoins, recognizing Tether’s USDT as a legitimate form of currency, further underlining the continued legitimization of stablecoins.
Aave introduced their latest update including token buybacks and activating a fee switch meaning actual value accrual for the token, likely as a result of the seemingly deregulated DeFi environment. Parallel to this development, Aave is launching the 'Horizon' initiative, targeting institutional investors by incorporating real-world assets. While initially this initiative was proposed to be accompanied by the introduction of a new token, the Aave community voiced their concerns regarding this which has held off that introduction for now. Hyperliquid also upgraded the protocol by linking the HyperCore and HyperEVM, enabling developers to transfer HyperCore spot assets, such as the HYPE token, between the two systems and utilize various token conversion methods. The Hyperliquid HLP vault experienced significant losses due to market manipulation of the Jelly token. The trader manipulated the token into a forced liquidation and substantial losses for the HLP, whilst hedging this loss himself on another exchange. In response to this incident, Hyperliquid released fully on-chain validator voting for asset delisting, to prevent similar future attacks.
Raydium is launching a token launchpad called LaunchLab, which is set to closely resemble the wildly successful Pump.fun launchpad. LaunchLab will function as a direct equivalent to Pump.fun, but will use Raydium for liquidity in the backend. In response, Pump.fun launched PumpSwap, a DEX on Solana similar to Raydium. Now, both entities have their own launchpads and exchanges, leading to a head-to-head competition to dominate the Solana market.
Berachain rolled out their unique Proof of Liquidity (PoL) consensus mechanism, kicking off governance on the blockchain. PoL is essentially an evolved version of Proof of Stake where participants stake both tokens and liquidity positions to secure and govern the network. Lastly, MegaETH successfully launched their testnet, introducing the highly performant layer 2 with up to 20,000 transactions per second, and a blocktime of only 10 milliseconds.
Portfolio company GTE, who are building on MegaETH, was also able to launch their testnet version on the MegaETH testnet. The testnet phase allows developers and users to engage with the platform's features, such as token swaps and liquidity provisioning, ahead of a full-scale launch. Additionally, Gyroscope announced their TGE this month for the GYD stablecoin, which aims to offer a resilient alternative to both centralized and algorithmic stablecoins. GYD is designed to maintain stability through a diversified reserve and employs algorithmic mechanisms to manage its peg to the dollar. Furthermore, Bitwise Asset Management has partnered with Maple Finance to introduce their institutional clients to decentralized finance (DeFi) and on-chain credit investment opportunities. This collaboration marks Bitwise's first allocation into DeFi, leveraging Maple's expertise and infrastructure to offer yield-generating, on-chain credit markets that are both secure and compliant with institutional standards. And last but not least, we at Maven11 have officially announced the launch of our third fund. More than ever, we will continue to back brave outliers who are pushing this industry forward, and we’re all enthusiastic to move full-steam ahead!
