Gate News reported that on March 18, Bitcoin Core released v31.0rc1 release candidate version, which is the next major version following v30.2. The version is currently open for testing, and developers can download binary files and review release notes. The official version is expected to be released after subsequent testing is completed.

On March 17, a short-term interest rate options trade betting on the Federal Reserve maintaining higher rates for an extended period closed for a profit of approximately $10 million, exiting ahead of the Federal Reserve's policy meeting. The core thesis of the trade predicted that U.S. interest rates in 2028 would be higher than market expectations. Driven by inflation concerns, the market has downward-revised its expectations for rate cuts.

AI operations platform Deeptrace announced on March 17 that it completed a $5 million seed round of financing, incubated by Y Combinator. Its core product, AI SRE Agent, can quickly identify the root cause of failures and automatically generate repair solutions. Existing customers include Opendoor and Mintlify.

On March 17th, PolyBeats detected that a new address on Polymarket invested $38,700 to buy the option "Extended's FDV exceeds $300 million on its first day of listing," with a current probability of 36%. Extended is a non-custodial perpetual futures exchange based on Starknet, with core mechanisms including unified margin and multi-asset collateral. It previously raised $6.5 million in funding in April 2024.

The dispute between Chainlink and XRP has escalated again over "whether XRPL possesses core value," with technical positioning and value capture mechanisms becoming the focal point. Chainlink representatives have questioned XRPL's development, while the XRP camp has fought back, emphasizing the transparency of its token distribution. Despite obvious market cap differences, the two sides have no direct product competition yet community tensions and "narrative competition" persist.

Gate News: On March 17, Sanctum, a Solana ecosystem liquid staking token (LST) protocol, announced the launch of Infinity V2. The new version achieves three core upgrades: support for real-time distribution of staking rewards per slot (the smallest time unit on the Solana blockchain), introduction of a yield smoothing mechanism to optimize user experience, and optimization adjustments to the underlying portfolio configuration. The INF token will be the first LST to support slot-level continuous yield distribution.

Gate News, on March 17, Sui Developers released a tweet stating that Sui's new virtual machine has been launched for testing, and a bug bounty program has been simultaneously opened. According to the introduction, the new virtual machine launched this time includes three core technology upgrades: a complete rewrite of the execution engine, faster caching mechanisms, and a next-generation Move language upgrade.

The "Outline of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China" released on March 17 proposes developing modernized infrastructure, strengthening the core industries of the digital economy, actively participating in international governance, and steadily advancing the construction of the digital yuan and Shanghai International Financial Center.

Gate News reported that on March 17, "Fed whisperer" Nick Timiraos stated that the Federal Reserve may be more inclined to remain silent this week, but market expectations are forcing the Fed to outline its policy path. Two former Fed chairs told him they hope to avoid making predictions about rate cuts in the near term. Whether current Fed officials will adopt the same approach has become the core focus of this meeting. Hawks and doves may stick to their respective policy positions by pointing to the same economic shock.

NVIDIA released the Agent Toolkit open platform at the GTC conference, with its core being the open-source secure runtime OpenShell, aimed at providing security protection for AI Agents. Huang Renxun pointed out that AI will expand from generative reasoning to action, and the enterprise software industry will evolve toward specialized Agent platforms. The platform collaborates with multiple security tools, and 17 software vendors have already integrated with it.