Gate News reported that on March 19, according to The Information, a certain CEX is promoting AI agents to use cryptocurrency for payments and is competing to reach a stablecoin partnership with Cloudflare. Due to Cloudflare's critical role in managing network traffic, if the agreement is reached, the relevant stablecoin will occupy a core position in AI agent-driven traffic. Meanwhile, competition is heating up, as a certain payment company also launched a payment protocol for agents yesterday.

Gate News reports that on March 18, the Federal Reserve's FOMC released a statement on March 19 with three changes compared to the January statement: First, adjustment to unemployment rate language, changing "unemployment rate has shown certain signs of stabilization" to "unemployment rate has changed little in recent months"; Second, addition of Middle East situation-related language, noting that "the impact of Middle East developments on the U.S. economy remains uncertain"; Third, Federal Reserve Governor Waller's stance shift, previously supporting a rate cut of 25 basis points at the last meeting, now changed to support keeping rates unchanged.

Gate News: According to CME "Fed Watch" data on March 18, the probability of the Federal Reserve cutting rates by 25 basis points in this meeting is 0%, maintaining rates unchanged is 98.9%, and raising rates by 25 basis points is 1.1%. The probability of the Federal Reserve cumulatively cutting rates by 25 basis points by April is 2.0%, maintaining rates unchanged is 96.9%, and raising rates by 25 basis points is 1.0%. By June, the probability of cumulatively cutting rates by 25 basis points is 16.3%, maintaining rates unchanged is 82.5%, and raising rates by 25 basis points is 0.9%.

Market analyst Jared Blikre points out that Bank of America's Global Fund Manager Survey shows large institutional investors are increasing their positions in emerging market stocks and commodities while reducing their dollar holdings. Powell's comments have a significant impact on market trends; if the dollar index breaks through 100, it will increase investment pressure, whereas the opposite would be beneficial for emerging market development.

Gate News Report: On March 18, Coinglass data shows that the entire network experienced $122 million in liquidations in the past hour. Among these, long liquidations amounted to $118 million, while short liquidations reached $3.61 million. By cryptocurrency, ETH liquidations totaled $54.45 million, BTC liquidations reached $48.87 million, with the two combined accounting for over 80% of total liquidations.

Gate News reports that on March 18, ALPH.AI data shows that SOMPI, a Meme project in the Kasplex ecosystem, has surpassed a market cap of 20 million USD. The project was launched by Kas.fun, Kasplex L2 Meme launch platform, and is the platform's third listed project. Meanwhile, Kaspa (KAS) saw gains exceeding 10% on the same day.

Vitalik Buterin recently pointed out that the concept of zero-knowledge proofs has misled many people, and he believes that running nodes remains crucial. Users need to read the blockchain in a privacy-preserving and censorship-resistant manner, and existing remote procedure calls cannot meet this requirement. He emphasized that Ethereum's future lies in going beyond the processing capacity of individual nodes, truly achieving a permissionless and bottleneck-free network.

Gate News bulletin, on March 18, João (@0xTimepunk) announced today that he has officially joined the Aave protocol as Chief Smart Contract Engineer. João will participate in the smart contract development work of the protocol and work with the team to advance the construction of on-chain lending applications. It is reported that João previously served as Engineering Lead at Superform XYZ and is also an AI project

Gate News message, on March 18, ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees made public comments regarding the US SEC's issuance of explanatory guidance on crypto assets, believing the significance of this guidance lies in the SEC's acknowledgment of its own power boundaries. Erik Voorhees contrasted Gensler's large-scale enforcement actions against utility tokens during his tenure, pointing out that this previously caused a significant decline in entrepreneurs' willingness to design utility tokens, instead catalyzing the creation of a large number of

On March 18, US natural gas prices briefly fell 3.6%, leading all liquidations across the network with a cumulative decline of 11.6%. The largest long position address was liquidated when prices fell below $2.91, with a liquidation scale of 638,364 contracts and a loss of $200,000. The address simultaneously held BTC short positions and long positions in crude oil and gold as hedges, but suffered losses on both sides.