Alibaba Earnings Call: Cloud and AI Commercialization Revenue to Exceed $100 Billion in the Next Five Years

On March 19, the European Central Bank held its three key interest rates steady—aligning with market expectations and marking its sixth straight meeting without a policy change. The deposit facility rate remains at 0.00%, the main refinancing rate at 0.25%, and the marginal lending rate at 0.50%, per FXStreet.

On March 19th, Onchain Lens monitoring data shows a crypto whale—after two months of inactivity—deposited $4.1 million into Hyperliquid and opened a 5x leveraged long position on 150,000 barrels of Brent Crude Oil (BRENTOIL), valued at roughly $16.08 million. The whale currently holds a total historical loss of $1.19 million.

Gold prices plunged 7% on Thursday, March 19, marking their seventh straight day of losses. Rising energy prices tied to the Middle East conflict have stoked inflation fears, while markets anticipate major central banks will keep interest rates elevated. TD Securities commodity strategist Daniel Ghali noted: “Gold has become a widely held asset among institutional investors, riding the momentum of currency debasement trades over the past year. But that trade’s foundation is now weakening. In the short term, we still see downside risk in the market. Gold has meaningful downside potential, yet it still holds support from the uptrend of its bull market phase.” (Source: FXStreet)

On March 19, OpenAI announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Astral. Once the acquisition closes, OpenAI plans to integrate the Astral team into its Codex division, continuing to focus on building top-tier tools and advancing their shared mission of boosting developer productivity.

On March 19, Binance issued a security advisory highlighting multiple recent asset security breaches in the crypto community tied to device environment issues. The platform urged users to prioritize protecting their private keys and mnemonics. Binance’s non-custodial wallet uses MPC-based technology, which distributes key shards across separate, independent environments. This setup boosts asset management security and effectively cuts down on key leaks and attack risks.

CoinDesk reported on March 19 that Opera—Nasdaq-listed browser company—has filed a proposal with the Celo governance forum to convert a prior cash transaction into a distribution of 160 million CELO tokens. Once approved by token holders, Opera will become a major stakeholder in the Celo network. The 160 million CELO tokens represent roughly 27% of Celo’s current circulating supply (about 600 million tokens) and 16% of its total maximum supply (1 billion tokens). The tokens will be transferred in a one-time batch from the unreleased treasury to a Safe wallet controlled by Opera. To preserve governance balance, the proposal caps the voting power of these tokens at 10% of total staked CELO—excluding protocol emergency scenarios. CELO is currently trading at around $0.07, a sharp drop from its late-2021 peak of over $6. Opera operates MiniPay, a self-custodial crypto wallet built on Celo—an Ethereum Layer 2 network designed for low-cost payments. MiniPay lets users send stablecoi