GeckoPulse: The Grand Opening of the Base x Solana Bridge!

Base’s Interchain Highway Is Now Open

The Base Layer 2 has officially launched its cross-chain bridge for Solana, which integrates Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).

According to a recent blog post, developers on Base will be able to integrate trading of Solana-native assets, and tap into liquidity across both chains.

However, it won’t be just a one-way street as Base builders can also export their tokens to Solana.

The bridge utilizes a custom multichain oracle, where independent node operators from Chainlink and Coinbase will verify cross-chain messages.

Additionally, the software is open-source, enabling dApp builders to begin integrating support for Solana assets.

The bridge is already up and running and deployed on Base-native applications such as Aerodrome, Virtuals and Relay.

Drift Accelerates Beyond

The Solana-based perpetuals DEX, Drift Protocol, has deployed its latest V3 upgrade.

As announced by the protocol on X, the latest iteration of Drift includes a completely revamped trading engine, allowing trades to be executed 10x faster.

With Drift V3, the team even claims that 85% of market orders can be filled in less than a second, with slippage lowered by 10x to as low as 0.02%.

Additionally, V3 will introduce Drift Liquidity Providers (DLP) which provides liquidity for both spot and perp markets, and is scheduled to officially go live in Q1 next year.

Last but not least, the latest update to the protocol includes several user interface changes, designed to provide users with better control and clarity.

Since the announcement, the price of DRIFT rose by 5.2% to a peak of $0.245, but has since retraced the move.

It’s Stake Night for XRP Holders 

DeFi project Firelight Finance just launched Phase 1 of its XRP staking protocol on the Flare network, allowing holders to fully utilize their idle assets.

Following the restaking mechanism popularized on Ethereum, users can stake their bridged FXRP tokens to receive staked XRP (stXRP) at a 1:1 rate.

Staked XRP will be composable with other DeFi protocols within the Flare ecosystem, but staking rewards are currently inactive.

The team expects its proprietary on-chain insurance model to start yielding rewards in Phase 2 if more protocols choose to participate.

Early stakers will also receive Firelight Points, which will be used to determine reward allocations in Phase 2.

However, any users who are still interested will have to wait as the team announced that its 25M XRP deposit cap has been fully filled in less than 12 hours from its initial launch.

A New Challenger for Prediction Markets?

As prediction markets continue to gain attention, it appears that the BNB Chain will also be getting its own native platform.

Earlier today, Binance founder CZ retweeted an announcement for a new native platform known as predict.fun.

The protocol also serves as a yield aggregator, enabling users to generate returns on their idle deposits.

Interestingly, the project has already been deployed on Blast and currently hosts two live markets as of today.

However, the project will deprecate its Blast instance on January 31 next year before migrating to the BNB Chain.

In Other News

Malaysia Cracking Down on Bitcoin Mining Electricity Theft. Malaysia is setting up a special committee, using drones and handheld sensors to crack down on operations stealing power from the grid, using it to mine Bitcoin. The illegal operations have stolen over $1.1B in power over the past 5 years.

Punishing the Bots. HumidiFi’s public sale of WET was swiped by bots using thousands of wallets. In response, HumidiFi is scrapping their WET token and will instead launch another token and airdrop the new token pro-rata to previous ICO rounds of users. A new public sale will be conducted on Monday.

Cloudflare Faces Outage Again. Global CDN network Cloudflare is down yet again, causing the front-ends of many popular crypto websites to be down. While services appear to have been restored, expect choppy network services throughout the day.

TON Treasury Files $420.69M Treasury Fund. Nasdaq-listed token treasury firm AlphaTON Capital Corp has filed for $420.69 million shelf registration with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, using the meme number to celebrate finally being unconstrained by the SEC’s “baby shelf rules”.

SUI ETP Now Live. The 21Shares 2x SUI ETF (ticker TXXS) was approved for trading on the Nasdaq exchange. TXXS will be a leveraged product and will be SUI’s first ETP on US markets.

Binance Introduces Kids Crypto Accounts. Crypto exchange Binance announced Binance Junior, a crypto savings account targeted at children aged between 6 and 17. Parents with a normal Binance account can open up to five Junior accounts. Junior accounts will not be able to trade or transfer the funds out to external wallets.

Two Arrested in Crypto Murder. Two Ukrainian nationals have been arrested for the torture and murder of Danylo K., a 21 year-old student and son of the deputy mayor of Ukranian city Kharkiv. While the motivations remain unclear, the victim’s crypto wallet was drained.

Solana Seeker SKR Token Launch Date Set. The token for the Solana mobile phone, Solana Seeker, will have a total supply of 10B tokens with 30% of the tokens earmarked for airdrops.

Taiwanese Stablecoin Debuts Next Year. Taiwan's first locally issued stablecoin could launch in late 2026, pending regulatory decisions on the currency backing. It is unclear whether the stablecoin will be pegged to the US dollar or the Taiwan dollar.