The head of the Plasma engineering team stated that Plasma One has entered the private testing phase, aimed at enhancing the usability and user experience of crypto products and building services similar to a new type of digital bank. The team plans to accelerate iteration and open up early access.

Gate News reports that on March 18, xStocks announced on the X platform that its points system, xPoints, now has query functionality enabled. Users can automatically accumulate points through three methods: holding tokenized stocks in their wallet, establishing positions in the lending market, and providing liquidity to decentralized exchanges (DEX). xStocks stated that it will announce more partnership information in the coming weeks.

Gate News bot message, a wallet associated with Rudy Kadoch (@KadochRudy) made its first deposit of $3 million USDC into HyperLiquid and purchased 50,330 HYPE tokens for $2.018 million. The wallet maintains an open order to acquire additional HYPE tokens worth $981,987.

EPOCH Digital Credit, in collaboration with Synthesys and Chainlink, has launched TreasuryPlus (TPLUS), the first digital tokenized private credit fund, covering six major markets including Singapore and Hong Kong. The fund employs cross-chain technology to offer stable returns and liquidity, and is open to qualified investors.

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.

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 market total open interest has reached $1.43 billion, setting a new record high and increasing over 100 times since its launch. The trading platform trade.xyz leads the market, accounting for about 90% of open interest and daily trading volume. The HIP-3 market supports 24/7 trading, enabling traditional assets to break through trading time limitations.

US stocks opened higher on March 17, with the Dow Jones up 0.66%, the S&P 500 up 0.42%, and the Nasdaq up 0.33%. Qualcomm rose 3.2% due to approval of stock buybacks and dividend increases, while Micron Technology rose 2.5%. Cryptocurrency stocks showed mixed movements.

Gate News reports that on March 17, NYSE American-listed bitcoin treasury company Genius Group disclosed that the company's founder and CEO Roger Hamilton repurchased 300,000 shares of the company at an average price of $0.37 per share in the open market last week. To date, Roger Hamilton has spent $2.9 million across seven separate transactions to repurchase a total of 5.5 million company shares.

On March 17th, DefiLlama data showed that decentralized perpetual futures trading platform trading volume rebounded, with Hyperliquid open interest up 27.8% since the beginning of this month. Both trading volume and open interest on major Perp DEXs increased.

Rakuten Group announced the release of Rakuten AI 3.0 on March 17, a high-performance AI model with 671 billion parameters optimized for Japanese. The company claims that it outperforms GPT-4o on multiple benchmark tests. The model is freely open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, fine-tuned based on the DeepSeek V3 model, and received training computational support from the Japanese government.