The popular AI framework Virtuals Protocol will host an in-person meet-up in Hong Kong on Friday, January 17.

After Fed Chair Waller delivered remarks on curbing inflationary pressures, market bets on Federal Reserve interest rate hikes rose sharply, the U.S. dollar strengthened, and precious metals including gold came under heavy selling pressure. As of press time, spot gold fell 2.6% on the day, dropping more than $120 to $4,480 per ounce, and hit a weekly low of $4,464 during the session. Independent analyst Tai Wong noted: "Chair Waller made clear that inflation has not seen a substantial slowdown, and emphasized that the Fed 'still has work to do'—a statement that triggered a sharp sell-off in the gold market. While this may still be a communication strategy of 'much ado about nothing', it is enough to make the market view the September meeting as a deadlocked situation where the odds of a rate hike and a pause are evenly matched." Waller’s remarks are his most explicit public statement to date acknowledging that further interest rate hikes may be needed to ease price pressures. In his speech, he pointed out that if policymakers cannot be confident that core inflation is steadily returning to the 2% target, the Fed "still has work to do." As a result, traders quickly ramped up their bets on a September rate hike. For other precious metals: Spot silver fell 3.63% to $66.77 per ounce; spot platinum turned from gain to loss on the day, down 0.27% to $1,841.9; spot palladium’s gain narrowed to 5.05% at $1,418.3.

Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said inflation driven by clearly overheated demand is difficult to resolve, has lasted longer than expected, and the focus must remain on determining whether inflation is merely temporary. He noted he has no strong views on the number of FOMC meetings and does not believe there is a conflict between the policy goals of the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury.

AI cloud service provider Lambda, which is backed by NVIDIA, has raised approximately $1 billion in private short-term debt, with the funds earmarked for purchasing computing power chips to support its partnership project with Microsoft. An anonymous source familiar with the matter revealed that the transaction was led by JPMorgan Chase, and the debt was pitched to private placement investors. The source further noted that the proceeds will be used to acquire NVIDIA GPU graphics cards, which will subsequently be leased to Microsoft.

U.S. 5-year Treasury yield climbs to 4.48%, hitting its highest level since February 2025.

French company Capital B announced it has raised €21 million in funding to accelerate its strategy as a Bitcoin treasury firm.

According to monitoring by TradingBeats (formerly Hyperinsight), the address holdings of crypto figure "Brother Ma Ji" (Huang Licheng) have once again slipped into unrealized losses. Currently, his long position of 34,900 ETH with 25x leverage carries an unrealized loss of $1.06 million; his long position of 155,000 HYPE with 10x leverage is down $237,000. He just stopped out his long PUMP position for a $103,400 loss, and after liquidating his long BTC position via stop-loss for a $237,000 loss, he re-established a long BTC position of 100 coins with 40x leverage.