Point of View: The Federal Reserve Has Over-Eased, with a 65% Chance of Stagflation in the United States

On January 17, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange announced that Hong Kong-listed Convoy Global plans to enter the Web3 space strategically. The firm intends to offer software development services for blockchain exchanges and projects, while preparing to launch a proprietary trading platform. With compliance as a core goal, it will explore digital asset trading platforms, wallets, and associated technologies. Convoy Global’s core business currently focuses on biometric recognition and security software services. It will rebrand to Convoy Global by December 2025, with a current market capitalization of roughly HK$123 million.

On January 17, per Coinglass data, after nearly two days of retracement in the crypto market, current funding rates for major centralized (CEX) and decentralized (DEX) exchanges are slightly leaning bearish. Bearish sentiment toward altcoins is even more pronounced, with specific rates for top mainstream coins shown in the attached chart. **BlockBeats Note**: Funding rate is a fee set by crypto exchanges to keep contract prices aligned with underlying asset values—typically applied to perpetual contracts. It’s a mechanism for fund transfers between long and short traders; the exchange itself does not collect this fee. Its purpose is to adjust the cost or profit for traders holding contracts, ensuring contract prices stay close to the underlying asset’s price. ### Funding Rate Interpretation - 0.01% = baseline rate - >0.01% = generally bullish market sentiment - <0.005% = generally bearish market sentiment

On January 17, per Onchain Lens data, whale address 0xf35 has fully closed its highly leveraged 2x XMR long position, incurring a loss of $896,020.

Binance now allows users to withdraw U.S. dollars (USD) directly via SWIFT bank transfers, per platform information on January 17. The service is powered by BPay, with transfers taking 0–5 business days to complete. BPay Global is a Binance entity based in Bahrain—founded in April 2025, it’s a payment service subsidiary of Binance that holds a Payment Service Provider (PSP) license from the Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB). In an official January 15 announcement, Bahrain’s leading retail and corporate bank, Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait (BBK), signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Binance Bahrain. This makes BBK the first bank to join the Binance Link program in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The partnership will leverage Binance’s crypto-to-fiat technology solution to deliver customers an unprecedented innovative experience.

On January 17, Vivek Raman—CEO of Etherealize, an Ethereum ecosystem and institutional analytics firm—told Coindesk in an interview: “Ethereum’s market value could reprice from the hundreds of billions of dollars range to the trillion-dollar level. At its core, Ethereum is infrastructure—what we call ‘civilizational-grade infrastructure.’ The value of this kind of infrastructure is in the tens of trillions of dollars, which is why I think a $15,000 price tag is reasonable. And I believe this shift will happen fairly quickly.”

**January 17** Senate Judiciary Committee Republican Chair Chuck Grassley and top Democrat Dick Durbin are urging the Senate Banking Committee to exclude the "Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act" from cryptocurrency market structure legislation, arguing its provisions would weaken federal fund transfer rules. In a letter, the pair flagged Section 604 of the Banking Committee’s market structure bill—intended to shield software developers from criminal liability for third-party misuse of their products—as a threat to federal unlicensed money transmission laws. Notably, the Judiciary Committee (which oversees Title 18 of the U.S. Code) was neither consulted nor given advance substantive review of the proposed changes. The letter cites the Justice Department’s prosecution of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, noting the case underscores that existing regulations already enable holding parties accountable for unlicensed money transmission. The latest pushback complicates the Ban