traction

Grayscale Research Director Zach Pandl stated that the two major blockchain networks, Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL), are considering adjusting their token economic models to enhance asset scarcity by reducing future token supply growth through lowering annual inflation rates. As important native assets supporting stablecoins and tokenized asset ecosystems, the prices of ETH and SOL are primarily determined by supply and demand dynamics. If the relevant code upgrade proposals are approved, under unchanged conditions, lower supply growth may provide support for token prices.According to Grayscale's analysis, if the relevant adjustments are implemented, the supply inflation rates of BTC, ETH, and SOL will continue to decline over the next five years. By the end of 2031, the annual inflation rates for Bitcoin and Ethereum are expected to be around 0.4%, and Solana around 1.1%, which is lower than gold's annual supply growth rate of about 1.8% and the U.S. CPI inflation level of about 3.3%. Currently, these token economic adjustments are still in the community discussion phase. Among them, the Solana-related proposal has gained broader support and has a higher likelihood of implementation; the Ethereum proposal still requires further discussion.If the adjustments are implemented, staking users may face reduced token rewards, as part of the staking income comes from the issuance of new tokens. However, due to the decline in the growth rate of circulating supply, the scarcity value of the tokens may increase, potentially providing price support. For ETH and SOL holders who do not participate in staking, they may benefit directly; the final returns for stakers will depend on the balance between the decrease in rewards and the increase in prices. Zach Pandl concluded that ETH and SOL are becoming important digital commodities supporting stablecoins and the tokenization of real assets, and the economic model adjustments aimed at reducing inflation may further strengthen their scarcity attributes.

CryptoQuant analyst Moreno stated that USDT liquidity is experiencing one of the most severe contraction phases in history. The market value of USDT has decreased by about 4 billion dollars over the past 60 days, approaching historically low levels. At the same time, the liquidity contraction is still accelerating, with the USDT supply decreasing by about 870 million dollars in the past 11 days, indicating that this is not merely a lagging effect caused by previous redemptions.Stablecoins are the most direct source of available liquidity in the crypto market, and the continuous expansion of USDT is usually accompanied by stronger price performance of BTC, while prolonged contraction phases often correspond to weak demand, market corrections, and declining risk appetite. However, the correlation between USDT flows and BTC prices does not prove a direct causal relationship; both may be influenced by risk-averse sentiment, with redemption pressure and spot selling occurring simultaneously. The current decline in BTC is not an isolated event but is happening against the backdrop of a continuous shrinkage of one of the main sources of market liquidity, which also explains why the recent rebound has been difficult to sustain. To improve the market environment, we need to see the 60-day change in USDT stabilize, daily supply contraction slow down, and re-enter an expansion phase.

Finance Minister Scott Bessent posted on the X platform, expressing support for open-source AI and the innovations it brings, but stated that open-source is not an excuse to arbitrarily infringe on U.S. intellectual property rights.If Chinese companies engage in secret, industrial-scale extraction attacks and cross the line into intellectual property theft, sanctions will be considered, and they will be placed on the entity list.

Ledger announced the expansion of support for Celo, having integrated Celo's CIP-64 fee abstraction feature into Ledger Live. After the upgrade, users can pay on-chain transaction gas fees using 18 types of Celo native assets, without needing to use the native token CELO exclusively.The assets that can be used to pay gas include USDT, USDC, USDm, EURm, GBPm, JPYm, CADm, AUDm, CHFm, BRLm, NGNm, PHPm, COPm, KESm, ZARm, XOFm, GHSm, and WETH. CIP-64 is a core mechanism introduced by Celo in the July 2023 Gingerbread hard fork, allowing transaction fees to be paid directly with approved ERC-20 tokens.According to official disclosures, nearly half of the transactions on the Celo chain are currently settled with US dollar stablecoins instead of CELO for transaction fees. Ledger had previously supported the sending, receiving, and exchanging of CELO and Celo native stablecoins in Ledger Live as of December 2025.

Tom Lee, Chairman of BitMine, the largest treasury in Ethereum, stated that there are ample reasons for the ETH/BTC exchange rate to strengthen in the second half of 2026. The core logic is that the narrative of ETH as a currency is gaining market attention. Tom Lee pointed out three major catalysts: the continuous growth of stablecoins, the wave of asset tokenization, and the increase in new forks and projects within the Ethereum ecosystem, all of which are reinforcing ETH's value storage properties and improving its performance relative to BTC.Tom Lee clearly expects the ETH/BTC exchange rate to continue rising throughout 2026 and emphasized that this is a key indicator worth ongoing attention. Tom Lee believes that macro factors also support the ETH/BTC exchange rate: the decline in oil prices alleviates inflationary pressures, cryptocurrencies remain downstream beneficiary assets of the AI narrative, and the advancement of the CLARITY Act and the GENIUS Act retains a favorable regulatory window.

CryptoQuant data shows that in Q1 2026, the total loan size of the CeFi credit market decreased by 6% quarter-on-quarter to $23.3 billion, marking the first contraction across the industry since Q3 2024. The reduction in loan size is attributed to crypto users reducing leverage during the bear market.Tether remains the largest lender, with a loan size of $15.8 billion and a market share of 68%, followed by Maple Finance ($2.1 billion, 9%) and Nexo ($1.8 billion, 8%). Market share is shifting towards Maple, Nexo, and Coinbase, with the three experiencing increases of 1.0, 0.5, and 0.7 percentage points respectively during the quarter. Coinbase and Maple saw loan sizes grow by approximately 6% quarter-on-quarter, while Nexo recorded nearly 1% growth, making them the only three major lenders to experience growth. The remaining institutions saw a contraction in loan sizes, with Galaxy Digital (-21%) and Ledn (-19%) leading the declines, while Tether's loan size decreased by 7%.

According to monitoring by Lookonchain, the wallet address 0xf7A4 associated with Arthur Hayes withdrew 44,156 HYPE from Gate one hour ago, worth approximately 2.93 million USD.Data shows that this address has completed two HYPE swing trades in the past two weeks, with a total profit of approximately 508,000 USD.

Members of the management team of the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and CSA Operator Aerugo published a systematic explanation of EF's mission. Aerugo stated that EF's core mission is to ensure that Ethereum becomes and continues to be a truly permissionless sovereign infrastructure: censorship-resistant, capture-resistant, open-source, private, and secure, capable of supporting large-scale trustless coordination.He emphasized that EF's focus is on eliminating extraction and capture risks that may arise at the protocol layer of Ethereum, particularly the two core challenges of MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) issues and the lack of default privacy. Aerugo described MEV as "the main battleground of the next cypherpunk war," and pointed out that "a public ledger without serious default privacy is a monitoring infrastructure with settlement guarantees."In addition, EF will move some of its work out of the foundation through spin-offs in the future, but will maintain strict standards for external funding. The recent departure of some personnel is part of normal organizational adjustments, and EF will handle it in a dignified manner without making personnel issues public.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, address 0xeef...00C continued to withdraw 136,500 HYPE (10 million USD) from exchanges such as OKX 9 hours ago and deposited it into staking.Since June 1, this address has continuously withdrawn HYPE from multiple centralized exchanges and staked it, with a total of 1,314,000 HYPE (91.67 million USD) withdrawn and staked, at an average withdrawal price of 69.7 USD.

CryptoQuant released the latest report indicating that Bitcoin has fallen to a new low of $59,000 in this bear market, currently only 9% higher than the realized price of $53,600, and from a valuation perspective, it is close to the bottom range of previous bear markets. However, CryptoQuant pointed out that the current bottom has not yet been confirmed. Last week, total Bitcoin demand dropped to negative 652,000 BTC, marking the largest contraction since January 2022; the one-year apparent spot demand growth rate also turned negative, falling to its weakest level since February 2024.Meanwhile, ETF purchase demand experienced the fastest contraction since its launch in January 2024, with the 30-day ETF demand growth rate hitting a historical low. The report also stated that realized losses in the past 30 days amounted to 187,000 BTC, which has not yet reached the level of historic sell-off clearance.

Tom Lee stated at the DACFP conference for investment advisors that the current financial system is built on a multi-layer technology stack, with a significant amount of "false or fraudulent transactions." He noted that Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC) have "never had fraudulent transactions" at the blockchain level, and that the operational costs of blockchain are lower.Tom Lee further pointed out that investing in blockchain is similar to holding real estate assets, and in the future, "agent-based AI" will rely on blockchain for higher speeds and to prevent system failures. He also mentioned that the supply of ETH is contracting, and BitMine may not need to hold more than 5% of the total supply of ETH. Additionally, he stated that BitMine may be included in the Russell 1000 index by the end of June, which could provide stability support for its stock price, and referenced the company's holdings in MrBeast-related financial companies.

Particle Network today announced the next phase product roadmap for Universal Accounts, which will launch two new products in the coming months: 1. Universal Deposit SDK: Developers only need about 10 lines of code to allow users to deposit assets from any chain into the application, significantly lowering the threshold for multi-chain asset access. 2. Universal Agent Accounts: An API and Dashboard for AI Agents, enabling AI Agents to own and manage their own Universal Accounts.Previously, Particle released EIP-7702 Universal Accounts in March, supporting any EOA account to upgrade frictionlessly to a Universal Account. This roadmap further strengthens the infrastructure positioning of Universal Accounts in scenarios such as developer integration, AI Agent asset management, and multi-chain asset circulation. Overall, Particle is advancing Universal Accounts from "account abstraction capability" to a broader chain abstraction application layer infrastructure, which is expected to enhance its developer adoption and distribution capabilities within the on-chain ecosystem.

Crypto market analyst Axel posted on social media that the BTC futures market saw a daily liquidation of approximately $526 million in shorts, and the open interest (OI) did not rebuild leverage after reaching a peak of 319,499 BTC, instead falling back to 293,045 BTC.The liquidation dominance indicator has turned positive after being in negative territory for two consecutive weeks, indicating the end of the systemic short squeeze phase. The current price remains stable in the range of 75,000-76,000 while OI contracts, forming a constructive structure of "cooling after a short squeeze," rather than a new round of overheating. The next focus will be whether OI will return above 300,000 BTC when the price attempts to break through.

Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that Ethereum has been discussing account abstraction (AA) since early 2016. Now, EIP-8141 serves as a comprehensive proposal aimed at addressing all remaining issues related to AA. The core concept of this proposal is "frame transactions," where a transaction contains N calls that can read each other's call data and can authorize the sender and gas payer.This mechanism supports various use cases: ordinary account transactions (such as multi-signature, variable keys, quantum-resistant signature schemes) are completed through validating frames and executing frames; when paying gas fees with non-ETH tokens, it can be achieved through the main contract without any intermediaries.In terms of privacy protocols, ZK-SNARK verification or the addition of two-dimensional randomness can be implemented through payment contracts. Regarding security, on-chain transactions are only valid when the validating frame returns an ACCEPT with a gas payment flag, while the memory pool layer will initially adopt conservative rules, gradually expanding later.EIP-8141 is highly complementary to FOCIL, with FOCIL ensuring quick transaction inclusion and AA ensuring that complex operations can be executed as first-class transactions directly. The proposal is also discussing EOA compatibility, which is theoretically feasible. After more than a decade of research, these technologies are expected to be implemented within a year through the Hegota fork.

Binance's co-CEO Richard Teng posted on the X platform: "Recently, there have been some false reports regarding our compliance program. The Wall Street Journal published defamatory statements, and despite our efforts to clarify the facts, the journalist did not acknowledge any corrections we made regarding the relevant allegations. We have sent a letter requesting an immediate correction and complete retraction of these false statements."In a previous clarification regarding the compliance program, Binance stated that recent reports about its sanctions compliance relied on incomplete and inaccurate descriptions that did not reflect the full facts and complete investigation records. Regarding the risk exposure to Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance has reduced its direct risk exposure to the country's four major exchanges by over 97.3%, from $4.19 million to $110,000.

VanEck released its on-chain Bitcoin report in mid-February 2026. The report noted, "BTC continues to decline, and market sentiment is weakening: Bitcoin has dropped 29% in the past 30 days, pushing the NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss) indicator close to the 'anxiety zone' and briefly entering the 'fear zone'.Meanwhile, leverage has completed its reset, and the size of open contracts has fallen back to levels not seen since September 2024. Mid-term holders dominate the distribution, but selling is slowing down: realized selling is still mainly concentrated among those holding for 1 to 5 years, although in the past month, the distribution speed of coins held for over 1 year has noticeably slowed.Miner profit margins are under pressure, and hash rate is contracting: over the past 90 days, the total network hash rate has decreased by about 14%, reflecting tightening mining economics. Historically, similar situations often herald stronger subsequent returns for Bitcoin."

The fourth lecture of the Huobi HTX "New Year First Lesson" series will officially start on February 3rd at 19:00. This course features Taran, the head of Huobi HTX Growth Academy, as the special guest speaker. The theme of the course is "Finding the Real Signals That Can Make Money Amidst Chaotic Information," focusing on techniques for capturing information and extracting value in the Web3 industry.The core highlights of the course are clear. Taran will explain methods for capturing information in the Web3 industry, as well as how to distill valuable content from a vast amount of complex information, efficiently transforming information into investment support that effectively serves personal investment decisions.This course will still be live-streamed on the Huobi APP, and the full recorded version can later be found on Bilibili and Zhihu platforms by searching for "HTX Live." Investors can learn at any time.

Arthur Hayes posted on social media that the liquidity of the dollar has decreased by about $300 billion over the past few weeks, mainly due to an increase of $200 billion in the U.S. Treasury General Account (TGA). The government may be raising cash reserves to ensure spending in preparation for a potential shutdown. In this context, the decline in Bitcoin is not surprising, as it is in sync with the contraction of dollar liquidity.

According to Jinshi News, Damian Boey, portfolio strategist at Wilson Asset Management, stated that Waller tends to favor lowering interest rates but hopes the Federal Reserve will reduce the size of its balance sheet to achieve rate cuts.The market is reacting by contemplating what the world will look like if the Federal Reserve's balance sheet shrinks. Once discussions about withdrawing support begin, assets such as gold, cryptocurrencies, and bonds will be sold off.