On May 2, analyst Carol Schleif said that the balance sheet slowdown was more than expected, which should boost sentiment in the fixed income market to some extent. However, customers and market participants are increasingly concerned about the level of debt in the United States and who will have enough funds to buy all of it, so it is a good thing that the Fed is slowing down the pace of balance sheet reduction. The rest of the statement was also largely in line with expectations, given the three consecutive months of CPI reports heating up. However, the data released this week showed longest that while the decline in US inflation is bound to be bumpy, it will eventually slowly fall back to 2%.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia expects the Federal Reserve to start cutting interest rates in May next year and cut its benchmark interest rate by 150 basis points by the end of next year in response to a mild recession in the United States, Golden Finance reported. Carol Kong, currency strategist at the bank, said that we expect the FOMC's rate cut cycle to be more aggressive than the market expects. The market is currently pricing in a rate cut of about 90 basis points by the Fed next year. For now, still-strong U.S. economic data could reinforce the current soft landing rhetoric and keep the dollar higher, Kong said.

A developer named mononaut shared a new vulnerability in the Bitcoin Lightning Network "replacement loop attack" on X on October 21, prompting prominent security researcher and developer Antoine Riard to resign from the Lightning Network development team. The attack exploited specific mechanisms in the Lightning Network transaction process, causing potential financial losses to users participating in the channel. The attack unfolds in a multi-step process. Initially, when a payment is routed from Alice to Carol through a user, such as Bob, the payment is protected by the HTLC output in Bob's presigned channel commitment with each peer. A key feature of this setup is the time-locking mechanism, which ensures that outgoing HTLCs destined for Carol expire before incoming HTLCs from Alice, giving Bob a window to react if any issues arise. The goal of the attacker is to use this mechanism to force Bob to time out on-chain transactions when Carol fails to reveal the payment preimage before the timelock of block T expires. After doing so, Bob broadcasts the transaction to close the channel with Carol and recover the funds through the "htlc-timeout" transaction. Upon discovering the transaction, the attacker quickly broadcast a higher-fee "htlc-preimage" transaction, replacing Bob's transaction in the mempool. This loop is executed repeatedly to block Bob's attempts to recover his funds, and if the loop lasts for multiple blocks, it will eventually cause Bob to suffer financial losses, allowing Alice to time out HTLC on another channel.

The market value of USDT has risen by more than 25% this year, but the number of active users has dropped significantly. Where did the newly issued USDT go? How much has flowed to the trading market? 1. As of June 3, the total market value of stablecoins was about 129.216 billion US dollars, a decrease of about 0.87% in the past month, and a decrease of about 6.22% this year. 2. The current largest market value is USDT, which is about 83.212 billion US dollars, accounting for about 64.40% of the total market value, which is nearly three times that of USDC. Its market value has risen by 1.41% in the past month, and has risen by 25.63% this year, which is close to the highest point in history. 3. Since the beginning of this year, the market value of TRC-20 USDT has increased by 34.90%, and the market value of ERC-20 USDT has increased by 19.23%. However, the growth trend of TRC-20 USDT is more significant, the increment is larger, and the growth rate is faster. At present, its market value accounts for 54.07% of the USDT market value. 4. Although the USDT market value has returned to the high point in early May 2022, behind this lies a change in the internal structure of USDT, and TRC-20 USDT has become increasingly dominant. This change in composition will play an important role in understanding the market response to changes in USDT's market value, because there are certain differences in the application scenarios of TRC-20 USDT and ERC-20 USDT. 5. Since the beginning of this year, the daily on-chain transaction volume of TRC-20 USDT has shown an obvious growth trend, with an increase of about 71.76% within the year, while the daily on-chain transaction volume of ERC-20 USDT has shown a slight downward trend, with a drop of about 0.25%. The average daily on-chain transaction volume of the two USDTs is approximately 6.917 billion USDT. 6. At present, the stock of ERC-20 USDT in the exchange is about 9.29 billion USDT, which is the highest in this year. However, its daily trading volume has shown a significant shrinking trend this year. The average daily trading volume this month was only 36.7 million USDT, a decrease of 11.35% from May. 7. The current amount of ERC-20 USDT locked in the smart contract accounts for about 15.03% of its circulation, which is equivalent to the level at the end of July 2022, which is lower than the proportion at the beginning of May 2022 when the market value was similar (at that time it accounted for than about 20%). That is to say, the market value of the same size, the current USDT scale in DeFi is likely to be smaller than before. 8. The current number of independent active addresses on the ERC-20 USDT chain is about 56,800, which is lower than the average daily number of independent active addresses of 87,000 this year, and the overall trend is declining, which means that the scale of active users of USDT is likely to decrease . (Data source: Carol)