Morning News | PwC is increasing its efforts in the cryptocurrency sector; U.S. Congressman proposes legislation to ban insider trading in prediction markets; Flow network has fully resumed operations
Overview of Important Market Events on January 4整理：ChainCatcher
Important News:
- Financial Times: PwC is increasing its investment in the cryptocurrency sector
- Over $1 billion in related tokens will be unlocked next week, including ONDO, TRUMP, etc.
- WLFI: Will use unlocked treasury funds to incentivize USD1 adoption
- SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic plan to launch IPOs in 2026, potentially one of the most significant listing waves in history
- U.S. Congressman proposes legislation to ban insider trading in prediction markets
- Flow: Network has fully resumed operation, plans to release an attack incident analysis report within 48 hours
- CZ: The cryptocurrency market is small, but has huge potential
What important events happened in the past 24 hours?
CZ: The cryptocurrency market is small, but has huge potential
According to ChainCatcher, Binance founder CZ stated, "The cryptocurrency market is small. The potential of this technology is enormous, but it has not yet been fully developed. This is just the beginning."
Michael Saylor releases Bitcoin Tracker information again, possibly hinting at another BTC purchase
ChainCatcher reports that Strategy founder Michael Saylor has released Bitcoin Tracker information again, stating, "Orange or green?"
According to previous patterns, Strategy always discloses Bitcoin purchase information the day after related news is released.
The probability of a 25 basis point rate cut by the Federal Reserve in January is 16.6%
ChainCatcher reports that according to CME's "FedWatch" data, the probability of the Federal Reserve cutting rates by 25 basis points in January is 16.6%, while the probability of keeping rates unchanged is 83.4%.
South Korea approves only 2 virtual asset businesses in 2025, halving from the previous year
ChainCatcher reports that South Korea approved only 2 virtual asset businesses by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) in 2025, halving from 4 in 2024. The approval time has extended from an average of 11 months to 16 months, with some cases exceeding 600 days. The FIU has adopted a conservative approval strategy due to delays in the passage of the virtual asset bill. However, on December 23 last year, the FIU approved the license renewal for Dunamu, the operator of the largest exchange Upbit, which was approved about 1 year and 4 months after the expiration of the renewal period.
The FIU previously fined Dunamu 35.2 billion won, and after the sanction process was completed, the renewal was released. Currently, exchanges such as Korbit, Bithumb, Coinone, and Gopax have submitted renewal applications. The industry expects that as major exchanges complete their renewals, industry uncertainties will gradually be eliminated.
U.S. Congressman proposes legislation to ban insider trading in prediction markets
ChainCatcher reports that U.S. Congressman Ritchie Torres will introduce the "2026 Financial Prediction Markets Public Integrity Act," which prohibits federal officials from trading in prediction markets using significant non-public information. This move stems from a controversial incident: a Polymarket account created last December placed a bet of about $32,500 on the situation in Venezuela and made over $400,000 in profit within 24 hours after Maduro was arrested by U.S. forces, yielding a return of over 1200%.
The account made only 4 predictions, all related to U.S. intervention in Venezuela, and the market began to rise hours before Trump's announcement, raising suspicions of insider trading. The bill will extend the principles of the STOCK Act to prediction markets, which had a trading volume exceeding $44 billion in 2025.
ChainCatcher reports that according to the Shanghai prosecutors' official account, the Shanghai Baoshan District Prosecutor's Office has successfully filed and supervised 24 cases involving 24 individuals in a job-related crime case through a penetrating review of funds, tracking the flow of funds. Prosecutors stated that the number of accounts involved in the underground money laundering gang is numerous, making it very difficult to handle, with a large scale of fund transactions, and the laundering amount reaching 1.8 billion yuan. Ultimately, through pursuit and prosecution, they cracked down on money laundering activities that used virtual currency for cross-border transfer of illicit funds.
In response to new and complex money laundering crimes involving underground money laundering and virtual currency, the Baoshan District Prosecutor's Office guided the public security organs to penetrate fund accounts, clarify the sources and destinations of funds, secure electronic data, and accurately and effectively charge, fully ensuring the quality and effectiveness of money laundering case investigations.
ChainCatcher reports that Flow announced on the X platform that the network has fully resumed operation, and both its Cadence and EVM environments are online. Currently, over 99.9% of accounts have full operational access in both execution environments, and account recovery and fraudulent token repair work are ongoing.
In addition, the DeFi ecosystem on Flow is resuming operations, and cross-chain bridge partners are expected to restore after final verification. The official stated that a detailed technical post-analysis report describing the attack medium, forensic analysis, and repair methods will be released within 48 hours. A full recovery of the ecosystem is expected to be completed this week.
ChainCatcher reports that according to on-chain analysis platform Lookonchain, three suspected Polymarket "insider wallets" placed bets on Maduro's resignation hours before the Venezuelan president's arrest, with total profits of $630,484.
These three wallets were created and funded days in advance, betting only on events related to Venezuela and Maduro. Among them, wallet 0x31a5 invested $34,000 and profited $409,900, wallet 0xa72D invested $5,800 and profited $75,000, and wallet SBet365 invested $25,000 and profited $145,600.
ChainCatcher reports that recently, on-chain analyst Yu Jin monitored that in mid-September, the price of ETH surged to around $4,700, with as many as 2.66 million ETH choosing to exit staking. After three and a half months of digestion, the ETH waiting to exit staking has now been almost completely digested, leaving only 80,000.
After digesting about 2.6 million ETH that exited staking, the price of ETH dropped by 34%: from $4,700 in mid-September to the current $3,100. Currently, the situation is completely reversed, with the number of ETH waiting to enter staking far exceeding the number exiting: because Bitmine (BMNR), the Ethereum treasury company, has recently staked a large amount of ETH (593,152 ETH deposited in the last 8 days), the number of ETH waiting to enter staking has exceeded 1 million.
WLFI: Will use unlocked treasury funds to incentivize USD1 adoption
ChainCatcher reports that according to official news, WLFI announced that the governance proposal to use part of the unlocked treasury funds to incentivize USD1 adoption has been approved, with 77.75% of votes in favor. Community members reviewed the proposal and made a clear decision on the development direction of the WLFI ecosystem.
Vitalik: The combination of ZK-EVM and PeerDAS will push Ethereum towards a new form of decentralized network
ChainCatcher reports that Vitalik Buterin stated that the current ZK-EVM has entered the alpha stage, with production-level performance, and the remaining main work focuses on security; meanwhile, PeerDAS has officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. Vitalik pointed out that this is not a gradual optimization, but is transforming Ethereum into a new type of P2P network that simultaneously possesses decentralization, consensus mechanisms, and high bandwidth.
He recalled that BitTorrent has high bandwidth but lacks consensus, Bitcoin has consensus but is bandwidth-limited due to full replication; while Ethereum, after introducing PeerDAS (data availability sampling) and ZK-EVM, is expected to achieve decentralization, consensus, and high throughput simultaneously, solving the trilemma through "real code running on the mainnet." Among them, PeerDAS has been running on the mainnet, and ZK-EVM has reached production-level performance.
Vitalik expects that starting in 2026, with the advancement of mechanisms like BAL and ePBS, the gas limit will gradually increase, and there will be actual opportunities to run ZK-EVM nodes; from 2026 to 2028, gas repricing, state structure adjustments, and execution loads entering blobs will occur; by 2027 to 2030, ZK-EVM is expected to become the main way to validate blocks on the network, further promoting the increase of the gas limit. In addition, he also mentioned the importance of distributed block construction, with the long-term goal of avoiding blocks being fully constructed in any single location and decentralizing block construction power through either on-protocol or off-protocol methods to reduce the risk of centralized intervention and enhance regional fairness.
Data: The U.S. government holds over $30 billion in cryptocurrency, with BTC accounting for 97%
ChainCatcher reports that the U.S. government currently holds over $30 billion in cryptocurrency assets, of which 97% is BTC.
Over $1 billion in related tokens will be unlocked next week, including ONDO, TRUMP, etc.
ChainCatcher reports that according to onchainschool.pro, over $1 billion in tokens are expected to be unlocked next week, including several well-known projects such as ONDO, TRUMP, PUMP, and APTOS.
ChainCatcher reports that according to the Financial Times, the three major unlisted tech giants in the U.S., SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are preparing for IPOs in 2026, with expected fundraising amounts reaching hundreds of billions of dollars. OpenAI's valuation may reach $750 billion, SpaceX's secondary market valuation has reached $800 billion, and Anthropic is also seeking over $300 billion in valuation financing.
If all three go public, they will exceed the total scale of U.S. stock IPOs for the entire year of 2025, and investment banks and venture capital may see unprecedented returns.
Financial Times: PwC is increasing its investment in the cryptocurrency sector
ChainCatcher reports that according to the Financial Times, as the Trump administration embraces digital assets, PwC, one of the "Big Four accounting firms," has decided to increase its investment in the cryptocurrency sector after maintaining a cautious attitude for many years.
Paul Griggs, PwC's U.S. head, stated in an interview that this strategic shift occurred last year, against the backdrop of the U.S. appointing pro-crypto regulatory officials and Congress passing several new legislations regulating digital assets (such as stablecoins).
Griggs stated, "The Genius Act and the regulatory details surrounding stablecoins will enhance market confidence in this product and asset class. Asset tokenization will also continue to evolve, and PwC must be part of this ecosystem."
His statement highlights that a series of actions by the Trump administration on cryptocurrency policy have finally convinced blue-chip companies that they can truly enter this long-avoided digital asset market.
Meme Popularity Rankings
According to meme token tracking and analysis platform GMGN market data, as of January 5, 09:00,
The top five popular tokens on ETH in the past 24 hours are: SHIB, LINK, PEPE, UNI, ONDO
The top five popular tokens on Solana in the past 24 hours are: TRUMP, PENGU, Fartcoin, FO, ME
The top five popular tokens on Base in the past 24 hours are: PEPE, BASED, NATO, SKYA, B3
What are some noteworthy articles to read in the past 24 hours?
In this episode of Stableminded, Drew talks with Anthony Apollo, the executive director of the Wyoming Stable Token Commission (@wyostable), to delve into how Wyoming became the first state in the U.S. to issue an official stablecoin and why its operation is outside the federal regulatory framework.
The Frontier Stable Token (FRNT) is not issued by banks or trust institutions in Wyoming, but directly issued by Wyoming as a sovereign entity. The GENIUS Act defines stablecoin issuers as "people," including banks, trusts, fintech companies, and commercial entities, but does not include "state governments" in the definition of issuers.
Anthony reviews the decade-long legislative process in detail, explaining how FRNT achieved deployment across 7 blockchains through LayerZero, and how it built a complete infrastructure system in collaboration with institutions like Franklin Templeton, Fireblocks, and Chainalysis. The team that accomplished all this consists of only 5 people, with an overall budget of less than $6 million.
DTCC is not on-chain stocks: What is really changing?
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has received a "no-action letter" from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), allowing it to begin tokenizing securities infrastructure. This is a significant upgrade for the "pipeline system" of the U.S. capital markets: DTCC holds $99 trillion in securities and supports trading volumes measured in "trillions" annually.
However, the market's reaction to this announcement reveals a "gap between expectation and reality": the objects being tokenized are security entitlements, not the stocks themselves, and this distinction determines everything that follows.
RootData 2025 Web3 Industry Annual Report
The crypto industry is transitioning from extreme volatility to institutionalization: Bitcoin's market value fell by 8%, underperforming gold and tech stocks, capital is highly concentrated in compliant tracks like CeFi, structural differentiation in the primary market has intensified, and the wave of mergers and IPOs indicates accelerated consolidation in 2026.
Based on a16z's annual predictions, which crypto projects are worth paying attention to?
This article summarizes eight key tracks to watch in 2026 and identifies the "future winners" in various subfields.
Risk warning
