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

August 2026 witnessed a notable recovery in cryptocurrency market trading activity, with core data as follows: Spot-led growth: Spot trading volume on major centralized exchanges (CEXs) rose 18.64% month-over-month, while perpetual contract volume increased 10.89%. The significantly higher spot growth indicates the market rebound is primarily driven by spot buying demand. Traffic-trading divergence: Major CEXs saw a 0.26% slight drop in website visits in August, and app downloads fell 5.61%. Against the backdrop of slowing new user traffic, trading volume rose against the trend, signaling this round of growth mainly comes from increased trading frequency and conversion efficiency among existing users. Perp DEXs also rebounded: Major perpetual decentralized exchanges (Perp DEXs) recorded an 8.98% month-over-month rise in August trading volume, with overall web traffic remaining stable. CEX rankings & performance: Volume leaderboard: Binance remains the industry leader with $233 billion in spot volume and $1.606 trillion in contract volume. OKX (spot: $46 billion / contracts: $634 billion) and Bybit (spot: $46 billion / contracts: $365 billion) rank second and third respectively. Rank changes: Coinbase’s spot ranking climbed 2 spots to 7th; Kraken rose 1 spot to 9th. User traffic leaderboard: Binance (2.532 million downloads, 34.19 million web visits) and OKX (550,000 downloads, 25.62 million web visits) retain the top two positions. Perp DEX highlights: Hyperliquid leads the decentralized perpetual contract market with $207 billion in contract trading volume. EdgeX’s trading volume surged 70.60% month-over-month; ApeX, Lighter, and Aster all posted notable growth of 17% to 22%.

Beating AI News Flash, citing The Wall Street Journal (WSJ): South Korea’s government is set to announce a major energy investment project in the U.S. to support American artificial intelligence (AI) development, a long-awaited milestone from the trade deal Washington and Seoul struck last year. According to sources familiar with the matter, the deal has a potential value of over $100 billion. The plan calls for South Korea to fund the construction of up to eight nuclear power plants and one natural gas project. Last October, former U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korean leader Lee Jae-myung reached an agreement: the U.S. would lower most tariffs from 25% to 15%, including those on South Korea’s auto sector. In exchange, South Korea pledged $350 billion in U.S. investments plus an additional $100 billion in purchases of American energy. No projects had been implemented prior to this, drawing dissatisfaction from U.S. officials including Trump. Trump had threatened in January to raise tariffs on South Korea again. The two sides are now close to finalizing two agreements, which could be announced as early as next week. Negotiations remain ongoing, and investment details as well as the announcement timeline may change.

Beating AI Express News: DeepSeek Harness v0.1.5 has been released. The V4.1 Flash model underwent dedicated training and optimization specifically for Harness during development, covering three modes: Standard, PTC, and Minimalist. Harness is now directly integrated into the model training process, rather than merely serving as an Agent wrapper added post-model release. The new version also introduces experimental Agent Teams, enabling bidirectional communication between parent and child Agents. The main Agent can assign models and inference intensity to different child Agents; multiple Agents can also share tasks, send messages to each other, and have their outputs aggregated by the main Agent. V4.1 Flash features a notable long-task optimization: when an Agent modifies system prompts mid-run, it can retain most existing KV Cache, eliminating the need to recalculate large subsequent context segments due to minor rule adjustments earlier in the task. The web version now adds file upload and preview functionality, supporting formats including PDF, images, and code. Plugins can integrate their own UIs into the left/right sidebars and content areas, while optimizations have been implemented for long sessions in terms of loading, recovery, and memory usage.

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes stated in a post that Flop Labs’ Yellow Paper is now live. Flop Labs is building a blockchain network for the AI agent economy, utilizing the Proof of Useful Inference mechanism. The network is designed to enable AI agents to use FLOP tokens to purchase computing power and have their computational tasks verified via the network. Earlier, Flop Labs announced its token economic model, clarifying no VC allocations or public offerings; tokens will be distributed via airdrops to miners, validators, AI agents, and early community participants.

Per TradingBeats monitoring, ZEC is currently trading at approximately $1,218.8. An address starting with 0xbf73 sold all 13,000 ZEC in three batches from the evening of September 9 to early this morning, totaling about $16.4017 million, with an average closing price of roughly $1,261.67. The address’s original holding cost was around $869.6, generating an approximate profit of $5.096 million from this round; its current ZEC positions and pending orders have been reduced to zero. While early long positions are exiting, an address starting with 0x152e is expanding its ZEC position. Over the same period, this address accumulated an additional 9,426.59 ZEC, with actual purchases totaling ~$11.636 million at an average entry price of ~$1,234.38. Adding to its existing holdings, its total position now stands at 11,739.54 ZEC, valued at ~$14.3082 million, with an overall average cost of ~$1,217.62, currently holding an unrealized profit of ~$13,900. The latest purchases have fallen below its average entry price of $1,234.38, but the address still maintains buy orders worth ~$3.01 million at $1,185.5 to $1,205.5, planning to expand its position further to $17 million if prices decline more. The on-chain perpetual contract and address analysis tool TradingBeats is now live, supporting real-time Hyperliquid data viewing—from address tracing to whale operations, with in-depth analysis available at a glance.

Beating AI Express: Over the past few months, the top spot among domestic Chinese AI models has been swapped between Kimi and Zhipu AI. In the latest third-party ranking from Artificial Analysis, Kimi K3 and GLM-5.3 scored 44 and 45 points respectively, while DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 only earned 36 points. Now DeepSeek is fighting back with its V4.1 Flash model. According to official evaluations, among the 16 tests where both models have results, V4.1 Flash won 13 against Kimi K3; in the 13 overlapping tests with GLM-5.3, it took 11 wins. Its advantages lie mainly in coding, terminal operations, and agent automation. What’s more, this may just be the start: Kimi K3 is Kimi’s current strongest 2.8T parameter model, GLM-5.3 is Zhipu’s flagship, while V4.1 Flash is merely the smallest model in DeepSeek’s new architecture series.