according to market sources, Jake Ostrovskis, head of Wintermute's over-the-counter trading business, stated that $13 million has flowed into Bitcoin call options with strike prices between $98,000 and $100,000, indicating a possible rise in Bitcoin prices in the first quarter.

the US spot XRP exchange-traded fund (ETF) experienced its first net outflow of funds since its launch, with approximately $40.8 million flowing out on Wednesday, ending several consecutive weeks of inflows. On Wednesday, the spot Bitcoin ETF recorded a $486 million outflow, marking the largest single-day net outflow since November. The spot Ethereum ETF also saw an outflow, with a net outflow of $98 million. Despite experiencing its first outflow, the XRP ETF remains one of the strongest performing cryptocurrency exchange-traded products (ETPs), with its total net assets still hovering above $1.5 billion.

according to market sources: CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju stated that Bitcoin inflows have dried up, with funds rotating into the stock and gold markets, but he expects the market to show a dull sideways trend rather than a sharp crash.

 according to Cloverpool data, Bitcoin mining difficulty adjusted at block height 931,392 (15 minutes ago), with mining difficulty decreased by 1.20% to 146.47 T; currently, the network's average hash rate over the past seven days is 1.06 ZH/s.

according to Onchain Lens monitoring, a certain whale deposited 5 million USDC to HyperLiquid and opened a BTC long position with 3x leverage, valued at about 11 million USD. This position is still increasing. In the past 5 hours, the whale also spent 4.84 million USD to buy 180,004 HYPE.

Binance officially launched TradFi perpetual contracts on January 8, 2026, aiming to bridge the gap between traditional finance and digital assets. The first contract XAUUSDT (Gold) opened on January 5, 2026, and XAGUSDT (Silver) went live on January 7, 2026. Users can trade through Binance's web platform or App.

 according to official news, Binance Alpha has launched the Chinese Meme token "I'm coming, damn it".

according to Xinhua News Agency, the Ministry of Commerce of China held a regular press conference on the 8th. Ministry of Commerce spokesperson He Yadong, in response to questions about the review of Meta's acquisition of the artificial intelligence platform Manus, stated that the Chinese government consistently supports enterprises in conducting mutually beneficial and win-win multinational operations and international technological cooperation in accordance with laws and regulations. It should be noted that enterprises engaged in outward investment, technology export, data outbound transfer, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and other activities must comply with Chinese laws and regulations and fulfill statutory procedures. The Ministry of Commerce will work with relevant departments to carry out evaluation and investigation on the consistency of this acquisition with laws and regulations related to export control, technology import and export, and outward investment.

 Ethereum founder Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that increasing Ethereum's bandwidth is safer than reducing latency. With the support of PeerDAS and ZKP, we already clearly understand how to scale, and in terms of potential, compared to the current state, theoretically, it can achieve thousands of times expansion. Relevant parameters will become more favorable before and after scaling. Physical laws do not present any obstacles to the coexistence of "extreme scale + decentralization."

Reducing latency is completely different. We are fundamentally limited by the speed of light, and in addition, we face the following practical constraints:

Nodes (especially validators) need to be supported globally to operate in rural areas, homes, or commercial environments, not just data centers

Nodes (especially proposers and validators) need to be provided with censorship resistance and anonymity

Running nodes in geographically non-highly concentrated locations must not only be "feasible" but also economically sustainable. If staking outside New York results in a 10% decrease in returns, more and more people will choose to stake only in New York in the long term

Ethereum itself must pass the "walkaway test," so we cannot build a blockchain that relies on continuous social coordination to maintain decentralization. Economic incentives cannot bear all the responsibility but must bear most of it.

Of course, without making trade-offs, we can still significantly reduce latency on the existing foundation, including:

P2P network improvements (especially erasure codes) can reduce message propagation time without requiring individual nodes to increase bandwidth

An availability chain with fewer nodes per slot (for example, 512 nodes instead of 30,000) can eliminate aggregation steps, allowing the entire critical path to be completed within a subnet

These improvements are expected to bring a 3–6 fold increase. Therefore, I believe moderately reducing latency to the 2–4 second level is entirely realistic.

But Ethereum is not a global video game server; it is the global heartbeat.

If you need to build applications faster than the "heartbeat," they must include off-chain components. This is also one of the important reasons why L2 will still exist long-term even if Ethereum achieves large-scale scaling (other reasons include virtual machine customization and demand for even more extreme scale).

In the longer term, AI will inevitably give rise to applications "faster than the heartbeat." If an AI thinks 1000 times faster than humans, then for it, the "subjective speed of light" is only 300 km/s. This means it can achieve near-instant communication within a city but cannot cover longer distances. Therefore, AI-oriented applications will inevitably emerge, requiring "city-level blockchains," or even single-building-level chains — these can only be L2s.

Conversely, it is unrealistic to pay huge costs to run staking nodes on Mars; even Bitcoin does not pursue this. Ultimately, Ethereum belongs to Earth (Terra), and its L2s will simultaneously serve ultra-localized needs within cities and planet-scale ultra-large-scale

according to the official announcement, Binance Alpha will launch DeepNode (DN) on January 9th. Eligible users can go to the Alpha page to claim the airdrop using Alpha points after trading opens. More details will be announced soon.