U.S. CFTC Acting Chairman: Enforcement Division Restructured, Refocused on Combating Fraud

**On January 18, BitMine Chairman and Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee told CNBC in an interview:** - "January’s first five trading days of gains are a positive sign for the full year, lifting the S&P 500’s upside potential to 7700 points." - "Recent volatility across financial, broader market, and crypto sectors partially stems from policy: Washington is pushing to cap credit card rates. If enacted, this would weaken financial institutions’ ability to lend to diverse consumers—hitting the sector." - "Progress on the ‘Clarity Act’ is bullish for crypto. The market took a heavy hit last October, so we expect a meaningful recovery as we move past that impact point." - "We’re bullish on Bitcoin (likely to hit a new all-time high this year) and even more optimistic on Ethereum, which we forecast to outperform Bitcoin."

January 18: Emmett, Solana Mobile’s project lead, noted in an X post: “In addition to existing anti-bot measures, the team is actively identifying additional Seeker account clusters. These accounts will be excluded from the initial SKR airdrop distribution and moved to a future airdrop pool. We do not plan to publicly disclose our specific detection methods, but rest assured we have been monitoring this closely for some time. “We want SKR to launch fairly and end up in the hands of users and developers who actually advance the platform. This benefits the vast majority of buyers who purchased Seeker for practical use.”

**On January 18, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin highlighted a long-underestimated pillar of "trustlessness," "escape-hatch-freeness," and "sovereignty": protocol simplicity.** In his post, he argued that even a protocol with hundreds of thousands of nodes, 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, quantum-secure peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, and STARK full validation would fail all three tests if it’s a clunky mess—loaded with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of cryptic doctorate-level cryptography. Such complexity would leave it neither fully trustless, sovereign, nor secure. One concern surrounding Ethereum’s development is that teams may be too eager to add new features to meet immediate needs, even if those additions bloat the protocol, introduce new interactive components, or rely on complex cryptographic technologies. While this delivers short-term upgrades, it risks compromising the protocol’s long-term sovereignty. The core issue: backward compatibility means

**January 18th Update** Data from validator tracking site Validator Queue shows the current queue of validators waiting to join Ethereum’s PoS network totals 2,596,246 ETH—valued at roughly $8.61 billion—with an expected activation delay of about 45 days and 2 hours. The main driver? BitMine recently staked a large amount of its ETH holdings. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s PoS unstaking queue has been cleared: there are currently no users redeeming staked ETH.

On January 18, Vietnamese police arrested five suspects accused of running a cryptocurrency scam ring targeting the Da Nang area. The suspects, based in Cambodia, operated the scheme by mimicking the Nasdaq exchange, defrauding victims of 1.4 billion Vietnamese dong (approximately $53,280). They used messaging apps Zalo and Telegram to create dozens of fake accounts, post fake trading activity, pose as investment experts to lure people into investing, and falsely report profits. After obtaining the funds, the group transferred them through multiple bank accounts before converting them into cryptocurrency to conceal their origin.

Cathie Wood, founder of ARK Invest, said on January 18: “Over the past few years, we’ve seen a clear trend of declining inflation—yet official reports show inflation has stagnated. With market valuations near historical highs, many are asking if this signals a coming pullback. Historically, from the 1990s through ~1997 and the early 2000s, the market delivered strong gains even as valuation multiples fell. We expect valuations to compress, and this expectation is baked into our bottom-up analysis of every company.” That said, we remain optimistic on inflation for three key reasons: oil prices, housing costs, and technology. KB Home has cut home prices by 7%, with peers following. Productivity is improving sharply, and unit labor costs are falling—creating multiple deflationary pressures. Our focus is solely on tech-driven innovation: robotics, energy storage, AI (in particular), blockchain, and multiomic sequencing in healthcare. We expect inflation data to come in below market