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According to The Block, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng stated that the MiCA license application submitted by Binance in Greece fully complied with regulatory requirements and was close to approval before being withdrawn, but ultimately the process was interrupted due to "external political factors."In an interview, Zhao Changpeng mentioned that several countries within the EU had expressed interest in the license, and there was even a certain degree of "competitive pursuit," but the regulatory progress was ultimately affected by non-regulatory factors, forcing the application to be withdrawn. Binance officially withdrew its application in Greece last week and stated that it would turn to other EU member states to continue pursuing MiCA authorization.In response to market rumors regarding his connections with high-level EU politicians, Zhao Changpeng stated that he had not seen any verifiable documents and only saw similar claims online, which he did not confirm. Zhao Changpeng also pointed out that the EU MiCA transition period will officially end on July 1, at which time platforms that have not obtained licenses must cease related services. Regulatory agencies in various countries have made it clear that they will not postpone enforcement, and they evaluate this outcome as a "lose-lose situation," using the regulatory processes in Japan and Singapore as examples to emphasize that compliance processes often require a longer period.Additionally, when discussing Strategy's STRC preferred stock product, Zhao Changpeng stated that its structure is "too complex" and expressed difficulty in fully understanding its mechanism, but emphasized that he does not comment on the credibility of its founder Michael Saylor, considering him a "staunch supporter of Bitcoin."

DeepSeek plans to raise approximately $7 billion in its first round of financing, with a valuation of up to $59 billion. Tencent and CATL will become DeepSeek's largest external investors; NetEase and JD.com also plan to participate in the investment.

edgeX released an update regarding the abnormal price fluctuations of the EDGE token, stating that the protocol has not been compromised in any way, and this incident is not a hacker attack, exploit, or security vulnerability.Current confirmed information indicates that this is an attempt by certain external parties to deliberately manipulate the market price of EDGE, which is a matter of market integrity rather than platform security. The team is actively investigating and collaborating with relevant exchanges and platforms, and a comprehensive update will be released after the investigation is complete.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams expressed deep gratitude for the long-term funding and multifaceted support provided by the Ethereum Foundation (EF), but specifically clarified that Uniswap was not incubated by EF, and that he participated as an external grantee with a close personal connection to EF.Previously, EF Chair Aya Miyaguchi and co-founder Vitalik Buterin publicly shared their views on the future direction of the Ethereum Foundation. Miyaguchi stated that part of the reason for proposing the EF mission framework at the end of last year was the issue of deviation in technical discussions.

According to on-chain analyst Ai Yi (@ai_9684xtpa), a16z (@a16zcrypto) may have become the sixth largest entity holding HYPE and could be the largest external holding institution if the top five are all part of Hype's own ecosystem.Data shows that a16z began a large-scale accumulation mode in August 2025, accumulating a total of 9.18 million HYPE (approximately $356 million), with an average purchase price of $38.77; after deducting the portion transferred to exchanges and market makers, there are still 8.844 million HYPE remaining, stored across dozens of addresses.In just the past 11 hours, a16z has added 206,000 HYPE (approximately $9.95 million) to its holdings; since April 16, it has accumulated a total of 2.35 million HYPE (approximately $10.2 million); since 2026, it has accumulated a total of 4.92 million HYPE (approximately $183 million). Based on the current price, its unrealized profit per coin has reached $7.929 million.

The TAC team announced that its cross-chain layer's TON side was exploited by external attackers, resulting in a loss of approximately $2.8 million, involving USDT, BLUM, and tsTON. TAC, TON, and all ERC-20 tokens bridged from Ethereum are unaffected. The bridging service remains suspended, and forensic analysis and repair work are ongoing. A complete report with more details will be released within the next 48 hours.The team is actively collaborating with law enforcement, SEAL 911, and security partners to track and freeze the stolen funds. The team stated that its core focus is to sell the foundation's TAC token reserves in a legally structured manner to compensate for user losses and fully restore bridging liquidity. Official channels will continue to update progress.

According to the Financial Times, Blue Origin, the American commercial space company founded by Jeff Bezos, is considering bringing in external investment for the first time. Introducing external capital could accelerate Blue Origin's operational expansion and technological research and development by mobilizing internal and external resources, thereby breaking through the growth model that relies solely on internal funding.More broadly, the rising interest of venture capital in the space industry may intensify competition for talent and contracts within the industry, while also sending positive signals of investor confidence to the supply chain and regulatory systems.

According to The Block, SC Ventures, the fintech and investment division of Standard Chartered Bank, has made a strategic investment in the crypto market maker GSR.The company has also been expanding into other tokenized financial services recently. This investment makes SC Ventures the first external strategic shareholder of GSR since its establishment in 2013.

According to market news, Hyperliquid founder Jeffrey Yan received an investment intention based on a valuation of about $1 billion and a scale of about $100 million less than a year after the project went live. However, after careful consideration, he ultimately chose to reject the investment terms.Reports indicate that before and after the financing proposal was made, the team had been continuously using personal funds to maintain operations, consuming the founder's personal finances each month to cover project costs. During the investor's engagement, Jeff communicated with several entrepreneurs and VCs about the nature and significance of financing, but he was never convinced that external capital could enhance its intrinsic value. Ultimately, he clearly informed the team on Monday that he would reject the financing proposal.Relevant insiders described that the team members managing funds were shocked by this decision, as several preparations had already been made around the financing. Jeff's core reason was that Hyperliquid is not a traditional company but an on-chain protocol that needs to maintain neutrality. He believed that once external equity capital was introduced, it could undermine the protocol's permissionless and neutral positioning, conflicting with its long-term design goals.He had previously stated that if Bitcoin had accepted VC financing in its early days, its neutrality narrative might have been weakened. Following the same logic, he chose to continue maintaining Hyperliquid's investor-free structure and to support part of the operating expenses with personal funds in the long term. On January 28, 2024, he summarized the project's principles on social media: · No investors · No paid market makers · No fees charged to the development team (or the development team does not take fees) · No insiders (or internal privileged participants). This statement is also seen as a core footnote to Hyperliquid's extreme decentralization/decapitalization approach.

According to a report by businesswire, Interactive Brokers announced the launch of a cryptocurrency portfolio transfer feature, allowing customers to directly transfer their platform-supported digital assets from external wallets or platforms into their cryptocurrency accounts associated with Interactive Brokers, without the need to first liquidate their cryptocurrency positions. This enables users to manage digital assets, stocks, options, futures, currencies, bonds, and other investments simultaneously.Interactive Brokers will provide a comprehensive solution that integrates digital assets and traditional investments on the same platform, thereby offering cryptocurrency pricing and a broader range of investment opportunities.

According to the Forbes official website, in the latest release of the 11th annual Fintech 50 list, the prediction market platform Polymarket (funding of $2.3 billion), the digital asset securities company Securitize (funding of $425 million), the crypto wallet Phantom (funding of $268 million), the crypto lending company Ledn (funding of $107 million), and the decentralized contract trading platform Hyperliquid (funding of $0 million) made the list.Forbes points out that although the valuation of the cryptocurrency industry is relatively conservative compared to artificial intelligence startups, it still demonstrates innovation and rapid growth potential. According to CB Insights data, the total amount of private financing in fintech is expected to reach $53 billion by 2025, significantly lower than the $152 billion in 2021.

According to Cointelegraph, Elon Musk announced that the external beta version of X Money will be launched in the next 1-2 months, aiming to become the central platform for all currency transactions.

In response to the collective departure of the Zcash development team, the nonprofit organization behind the project, Bootstrap, clarified that the governance disputes leading to the departure of team members stemmed from legal restrictions faced while seeking external investment. Discussions have been held regarding "alternative structures for external investment and the privatization of Zashi," while collaborating with legal advisors to ensure that any path forward complies with U.S. nonprofit laws, aligns with Zcash's long-term mission, and does not jeopardize the broader Zcash community.

Ethereum founder Vitalik reiterated the purpose of Ethereum, stating, "The creation of Ethereum is not to make finance more efficient or applications more convenient, but to give people freedom." This is an important and controversial statement from the "Unpermissioned Manifesto" that deserves our re-examination and a better understanding of its meaning. Words like "efficient" and "convenient" imply improving the average situation in an already quite good context. Efficiency refers to allowing the world's best engineers to pour their souls into reducing latency from 473 milliseconds to 368 milliseconds, or increasing the yield from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY.Convenience means enabling people to register in 20 seconds instead of 1 minute with just one click instead of three. These things may be well done. But we must understand that we can never outplay the corporate players in Silicon Valley in this game.Therefore, the main underlying game that Ethereum must play must be a different game. This game is resilience. Resilience is not about 4.5% APY versus 5.3% APY, but about minimizing your risk of suffering -100% APY. Resilience means that if you become politically unpopular and get banned, or your application developers go bankrupt or disappear, or Cloudflare goes down, or a cyberwar breaks out, your 2000 milliseconds of latency still remains at 2000 milliseconds. Resilience is that anyone, anywhere in the world can access the network and become a top-tier participant.Resilience is sovereignty, in the sense of "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty"—actively reducing vulnerability to external dependencies that can be arbitrarily stripped away at any time. This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win. Ethereum must first and foremost be a decentralized, permissionless, and resilient block space—then make it rich.

According to the token unlock data from the crypto asset data platform RootData, Xterio (XTER) will unlock approximately 44.53 million tokens at 10:00 AM Beijing time on January 8, valued at about 1.33 million USD.

Vitalik retweeted "Walletbeat has not yet included embedded wallets, but will include them in the future" and stated, "I would like to add one more thing: there should be support for connecting other wallets from the very beginning: if I am using a DApp with a built-in wallet, and I already have an Ethereum wallet, it should automatically set that Ethereum wallet as my recovery wallet."

According to an official post from OKX on social media, they have found conclusive evidence that multiple associated accounts were collaborating to use a large amount of OM to collateralize and borrow USDT, artificially driving up the price. After the risk control team intervened, the other party refused to cooperate, and OKX subsequently took over the related accounts. Shortly thereafter, OM plummeted, and OKX only liquidated a small amount of OM, with the related losses fully covered by the OKX security fund.Multiple third-party analyses indicate that the price crash was primarily triggered by perpetual contract trading on non-OKX platforms, raising questions about the unusual source of OM and its highly concentrated token control. The OKX security fund operates entirely according to its designed mechanism.Currently, OKX has submitted complete evidence to regulatory and law enforcement agencies, and multiple legal proceedings are underway.