zkLink is built on top of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a cryptographic technique that allows for secure and private data transmission. By using ZKPs, zkLink ensures that sensitive information such as account balances and transaction details remain private and cannot be accessed by unauthorized parties.

The zkLink protocol allows for the transfer of assets between different blockchains without the need for an intermediary. This is achieved through the use of atomic swaps, a trustless method of exchanging assets that eliminates the need for a centralized exchange. Atomic swaps are conducted in a decentralized manner, ensuring that the transaction is secure and transparent.

One of the key advantages of zkLink is its ability to support cross-chain communication between different types of blockchains. For example, zkLink can facilitate the transfer of assets between a public blockchain like Ethereum and a private blockchain like Hyperledger Fabric. This opens up a range of new possibilities for DeFi applications and makes it easier for businesses to integrate blockchain technology into their operations.

In addition to its cross-chain communication capabilities, zkLink also provides a range of other features designed to enhance the privacy and security of transactions. For example, zkLink includes a system for anonymous transactions, ensuring that users can conduct transactions without revealing their identity.

Overall, zkLink is an exciting new protocol that has the potential to greatly enhance the interoperability and privacy of the DeFi ecosystem. As more and more blockchains emerge, protocols like zkLink will become increasingly important in enabling the seamless transfer of assets between them.

On March 10, 2023 (Vietnam time), shares of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) dropped by 60%, leading to a wave of declines in bank stocks. Besides, this event can also have a knock-on effect in the tech start-up world.

What is the problem with Silicon Valley Bank? The above 60% drop occurred after Silicon Valley Bank announced its plan to call for an additional $ 2 billion from the sale of company shares (additional issue). This capital is used to strengthen balance sheets when technology startups have difficulty raising capital and accelerate the rate of "burning money" (according to Reuters).

It seems that the market is concerned about the bank-run risk that will happen to Silicon Valley Bank. Falling stock prices also make it more difficult for banks to raise capital.

After a drop of more than 60%, the market capitalization of SIVB (ticker of SVB Financial Group) is only 6.3 billion USD. Therefore, selling shares to raise capital during this period will be very difficult.

However, General Atlantic (a private equity fund) has announced that it will buy 500 million USD worth of SIVB shares.

Some start-ups are calling on their founders to withdraw money from SVB to prevent risks. Besides, Peter Thiel's venture capital fund Thiel Fund also advises companies to withdraw money from SVB.

Meanwhile, SVB is still informing users that their capital is still safe and convincing customers to limit withdrawals.

In case the bank does not raise the required amount of capital, bank-run risk will exist. Acquisition or rescue measures of SVB may be enforced. However, at that time, the company will conduct a restructuring to sell assets and lead to negative consequences for start-ups.

Some points to pay attention to in the balance sheet Information about Silicon Valley Bank's balance sheet is publicly announced by the company on its website, which you can find here.

View of SVB's balance sheet is referenced by Coin98 Insights from Twitter account @peruvian_bull.

In general, as of the end of 2022, SVB is holding little cash relative to their asset size. Banks allocate most of their assets into different types of debt securities, and investments in start-ups represent only a small fraction.

Specifically, the total assets as of December 31, 2022 of SVB is 216.1 billion USD. In which the amount of cash is only about 2.4 billion USD.

The company's cash and cash equivalents fell 5.4% year-on-year to $13.8 billion in 2022.

This means that the remaining approximately $11.4 billion in cash equivalents will be in short-term government bonds.

Customer deposits at the end of 2022 reached 173.1 billion USD, down 8.5% compared to 2021. Accordingly, SVB's cash-to-deposit ratio reached 0.0137, so if there is a wave of mass withdrawals in a short period of time, SVB will have to sell assets to ensure liquidity.

Banks invest most of their capital in different types of debt securities. Specifically, $120 billion (equivalent to about 56.7% of total assets) has been allocated.

Besides, SVB also increased the loan amount to 73.6 billion USD (up 11.8% compared to 2021).

Investments in start-ups (non-marketable and other equity securities) reached $2.66 billion (up 4.8% compared to 2021).

However, it seems that these investments were bought at a time when the Fed had not yet raised interest rates. The average yield is fluctuating in the range of 1% - 3%.

Currently, the average MBS yield (according to the S&P U.S. Mortgage-Backed Securities Index) is at 4.64%.

Therefore, if these assets are to be sold, SVB will record a loss. Besides, CMO (collageralized mortgage obligation) - a product with many similarities with the product that caused the 2008 financial crisis, also puts banks' balance sheets at risk.

Accordingly, the company's unrecorded loss at the end of 2022 is $1.9 billion. Now, this loss may have increased due to the upward trend in bond yields.

The company's lending situation is also not positive when the provision for credit losses increased to USD 420 million (up 3.4 times compared to 2021).

Although we do not have data on the company's latest financial statements, based on the above capital raising information, it can be seen that SVB is facing liquidity difficulties.

Impacts on technology start-ups Nearly half of all venture capital funds in the technology sector and 44% of health and technology companies in the US are storing money at SVB. The amount is estimated at 173 billion USD according to the above financial statements.

Therefore, if a bank-run occurs, start-ups will suffer heavy losses, especially in terms of liquidity.

The freeze of many technology companies will take place. Especially in the context that the capital raising market in general is facing many difficulties because of the FED raising interest rates and the unfavorable macro environment.

Besides, there are also many questions about whether SVB will sell off start-up stocks to ensure liquidity. However, based on the above data, the actual selling volume (if any) is still not significant (because it accounts for just over 1% of SVB's total assets).

In short, if SVB is bank-run, the worry will be that start-ups will not be able to withdraw money. The bankruptcy or shutdown of many technology companies may happen because of the high speed of the industry.

Besides, if this risk occurs, the authorities will also step in. The regulatory framework for the technology sector is likely to be tighter. This will stabilize the market in the long term, but it will have a negative impact in the short term.

Impact on crypto Under the above risk combined with negative information from Silvergate, the crypto market on March 10, 2023 fell sharply.

Bitcoin fell more than 8% below the $20,000/BTC mark. Altcoins also saw a drop.

Two banks related to the troubled technology and crypto sectors will be the basis for the US government to establish even stricter frameworks for this market.

Therefore, the IPOs of Circle or a few other major crypto companies in the US will have to be postponed. The growth momentum of crypto coming from investors in the traditional market will decrease.

This is also negative news for the US equity market in general. Specifically, the S&P 500 index fell about 2% after this news.

Risks to the tech sector will also worsen the outlook for the S&P 500 going forward.

Now, the correlation coefficient between Bitcoin and the S&P500 has increased again.

For most of the time in the past, Bitcoin has had a highly positive correlation with the S&P500 index.

This means that without a new breakout, the growth potential of the crypto market in 2023 is still very uncertain (as the correlation trend will continue).

LayerZero has just launched a testnet that allows users to transfer ETH from the Goerli Testnet to the Mainnet on the Ethereum network. With this move, many investors expect an airdrop from LayerZero. Is this really possible? Find out with Coin98 Insights through the article.

Does LayerZero really need tokens? LayerZero is a project providing infrastructure solutions for cross-chain bridge transactions with the Omnichain Fungible Tokens (OFT) solution.

Specifically, LayerZero provides a solution to authenticate information between different blockchains using Relayer and Oracle. The project is using Chainlink as Oracle for transaction validation.

The costs of maintaining light nodes on blockchains and oracles have been paid by LayerZero. Therefore, Dapps and users using LayerZero's cross-chain solution do not currently need to worry about these costs.

In the current context, does LayerZero need tokens to operate? The answer is no.

LayerZero does not make their own blockchain to censor transaction information (like Axelar). Instead, they leveraged Relayer and Oracle, positing that these two objects did not collude as a trusted authentication mechanism. Therefore, the project will not launch tokens because of security-related needs.

Read more: Cross-Chain Bridge: The next "Transportation" industry in the Multi-chain wave

Besides, LayerZero is also unlike ThorChain, the project does not need tokens for the purpose of intermediary liquidity because there is an OFT solution.

Moreover, LayerZero does not currently charge fees for OFT-integrated Dapps, so it is not necessary to have tokens for value accumulation.

Where does hope come from? On February 21, 2021, the project had an article on Medium titled “Public Goods by LayerZero” after almost 3 months without prominent updates.

Source: Medium Accordingly, users can join Testnet bridge, experience transferring ETH from Ethereum to Goerli (Ethereum's test network) and vice versa.

Realizing that the ETH supply on Goerli is very scarce, the project decided to deploy this testnet to serve developers.

In the past, many projects have allocated tokens to early adopters, especially during the testnet phase. Therefore, this move of LayerZero has made investors predict the possibility of a token launch.

Accordingly, an author with the Twitter account @0xkyle__ laid out his expectations for the LayerZero token in a Substack post:

“Stargate Finance - we LayerZero token? I actually think that the team is building something incredible - with the recent release of the Goerli Testnet and sudden activity by the LayerZero team, it makes sense that one of the most hyped projects finally start delivering something”

Going back to the above analysis, the project does not currently need a token, so what could be the motivation to launch a token in the future?

The motivation for LayzerZero to launch tokens After 3 rounds of funding with a committed capital of $143 million, LayerZero is currently valued at $1 billion.

Many famous investment funds such as Binance Labs, Sequoia Capital, a16z, … have participated in this deal. To raise the above capital, LayerZero must have a plan to help investors recover capital. A few options predicted by Coin98 Insights include:

Indirect withdrawal from Stargate (via tokens and fees collected). Withdrawal through LayerZero's service fee. And through the launch of the LayerZero token. Since September, Stargate has collected a total of about 1 million USD (including fees for LPs, aggregated data from DefiLlama). Thus, only USD 250,000 (equivalent to ¼ of the total fee) was allocated into the Stargate Treasury during this period.

In the past, Stargate's one-month ATH volume was $828 million. In that month, respectively, about 124,000 USD (0.015% of trading volume), were allocated to the Treasury.

In the past, Stargate's one-month ATH volume was $828 million. In that month, respectively, about 124,000 USD (0.015% of trading volume), were allocated to the Treasury.

With FDV in the range of 700 million to 1.3 billion USD (from the beginning of February 2023 to 7/3/2023), investors have not yet reached the breakeven point (not taking into account the liquidity factor).

Therefore, in order for the funds to be profitable, LayerZero will need to have more options from revenue or launch LayerZero tokens.

If LayerZero charges a fee, Coin98 Insights predicts there are two possible options in the future:

Fees for OFT integration projects: Accordingly, LayerZero may charge a one-time or annual fee to Dapps using their cross-chain solution. From there, the more integrated projects, the more fees LayerZero will have Fees based on each transaction: Corresponding to each successful transaction approved by LayerZero, users will need to pay an additional fee (which can be fixed or variable). In the Omnichain Fungible Token analysis, Coin98 Insights pointed out that many future projects using this solution are facing many obstacles. Therefore, this fee may not be enough.

When charging on a per-transaction basis, users will incur additional costs for each cross-chain token transfer. This also creates a disadvantage for LayerZero when users can completely choose another solution such as through CEX.

According to data from Dune Analytics, the total number of transactions from 4 blockchains using LayerZero is currently around 1 million transactions.

If LayerZero charges each of these transactions $1 for moderation, the amount of fees is still negligible compared to the size of the valuation. Especially in the context of OFT expansion is hindered.

Therefore, the market has every reason to believe that LayerZero will launch the token. Governance will likely be the strongest use of the token in this case. If the tokenomics design is reasonable when issuing tokens, LayerZero can completely create a governance game like Curve War.

How to earn airdrops? The Coin98 Insights team has an article on how to make an airdrop with the use of Stargate, which you can refer to here.

In addition, you can also participate in the project's latest event, testnet bridge. To transfer ETH from mainnet to Goerli testnet, you can visit the website

Sau đó, kết nối ví phi tập trung và thực hiện chuyển ETH. Mức giá khởi điểm của ETH trên Goerli (gETH) được dự án thiết lập tại 0.1 USD. 

LayerZero cũng cung cấp thanh khoản ban đầu cho pool ETH/gETH trên Uniswap (mạng Goerli) và khuyến khích cộng đồng cung cấp thanh khoản cũng như giao dịch để mức giá khớp với giá ETH trên mainnet nhất. Do đó, nếu có khả năng dự án airdrop token thông qua hình thức này, khối lượng giao dịch cũng là điểm chúng ta cần lưu ý.

Khả năng LayerZero ra token hiện tại hoàn toàn không phải 100%. Vì thế khi chúng ta tiến hành làm airdrop cũng cần chú ý tới các chí phí như bridge, trượt giá,… Bên cạnh đó, nhà đầu tư cũng cần tính toán các khả năng về lợi nhuận có thể đạt được (có thể bằng 0) để đảm bảo khoản đầu tư “retroactive" này mang lại hiệu quả tối ưu.