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

According to statistics, the 14 largest global funding rounds in the first half of 2026 raised a total of $4.3 billion, with prediction markets, AI, and payment sectors drawing the most investor interest. Specifically, prediction market platform Kalshi topped the list with a $1.2 billion funding round, while Polymarket secured $600 million—together, the two raised $1.8 billion, accounting for over 40% of the total capital of the top 14 rounds. In the AI space, Replit, Exa AI, and OpenRouter closed funding rounds of $400 million, $250 million, and $113 million respectively. For blockchain projects, Canton Network, Arc, and Morpho raised $355 million, $222 million, and $175 million respectively. Meanwhile, payment, RWA, infrastructure, and compliance projects including Rain, Slash, Goldcom, Alpaca, and Elliptic also featured on the list.

Open Standard has announced the launch of Open USD (OUSD), a new stablecoin for global fund flows, noting that over 140 enterprises have joined its ecosystem, including financial, payment, and crypto industry players such as Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, American Express, BlackRock, BNY, DBS, Coinbase, OKX, MetaMask, Aave, Ripple, Fireblocks, Solana, and Polygon. According to the introduction, Open USD follows three core design principles: supporting zero-cost, large-scale minting and redemption for enterprises; returning all reserve asset yields to partners after deducting a small management fee; and being governed by a board of directors composed of independent firm Open Standard and its partners, rather than controlled by a single issuer. Open Standard states that Open USD will officially launch later this year, with the goal of building an open, low-cost, high-throughput stablecoin infrastructure with a sharing economy mechanism to meet the needs of the internet economy and global enterprise-level payments.

Pump.fun announced it will immediately cease support for its Tokenized Agent token issuance feature. The feature will no longer be available for new token launches, though projects that have already activated it will remain unaffected. The platform noted that over recent months, consistent community feedback has pointed out that excessive issuance options have sparked unnecessary user vs. user (PVP) competition. Moving forward, Pump.fun will prioritize issuance models and product features that explicitly enhance retail trading experiences.

Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire stated that as the internet continues to reshape the global infrastructure for storing and transferring value, stablecoins will emerge as one of the world’s largest market opportunities — a core reason Circle was founded and has since built the world’s largest compliant stablecoin network. Allaire noted that USDC remains the world’s most trusted, widely adopted, and institutional-grade stablecoin, with thousands of partners across sectors including banking, payments, capital markets, and enterprises. Circle will continue expanding the USDC ecosystem, including supporting more blockchain networks, enhancing cross-chain interoperability, and enabling more partners to participate in the economic value generated by the USDC network. Additionally, Allaire said Circle welcomes ongoing innovation and competition in the stablecoin space, and will expand support for more U.S. dollar and non-U.S. dollar stablecoins across its products: Arc, CCTP, StableFX, Circle Wallets, and CPN, to advance the development of a stablecoin-centric internet financial system.

Binance announced a partnership with digital asset custodian Anchorage Digital, integrating the latter’s Atlas over-the-counter (OTC) settlement platform into Binance’s Triparty Banking network to offer institutional clients a new compliant custody and settlement solution. Through this integration, eligible institutional clients can independently custody crypto assets and U.S. dollar funds with Anchorage Digital, using these as collateral to trade on Binance without pre-depositing funds on the trading platform—reducing counterparty risk and boosting capital efficiency. Furthermore, Binance noted that Triparty Banking supports not only transaction settlement but also capital market services including lending and collateral management. Institutional clients may also use cash, crypto assets, and select tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) as collateral, such as money market fund products like BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC, and Franklin Templeton’s iBENJI. The collaboration also marks the first time Anchorage Digital’s Atlas platform has been integrated into a cryptocurrency trading platform.

According to Bitget market data, European stocks wrapped up their first half of the year. As of Tuesday’s close, the Euro Stoxx 50 index has rallied more than 9% cumulatively, the Stoxx 600 index has gained over 8%, Italy’s FTSE MIB index has risen nearly 15%, Spain’s IBEX 35 index has jumped more than 12%, Germany’s DAX 30 index has advanced 2%, the UK’s FTSE 100 index has climbed 5.7%, and France’s CAC 40 index has increased 3%.