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

**February 16 – Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) told the 2026 World Economic Forum that the lack of transaction privacy is the last major barrier to crypto becoming a mainstream payment method.** Over the past decade, Layer 2 technologies have largely fixed crypto’s old pain points of high fees and slow speeds—but the full transparency and permanent traceability of public blockchain transactions still hold back everyday consumers and businesses from using crypto for daily payments. For example: If a company pays staff salaries via on-chain crypto, a simple “send” click would lay bare every employee’s salary to the entire firm. When paying a supplier, it would also inadvertently expose the company’s full balance, list of other suppliers, and detailed cash flow to competitors—something commercially unacceptable. CZ’s proposed solution is the “invisible rails” concept: Leverage blockchain as underlying infrastructure to deliver faster, cheaper settlement for existing payment

February 16th: OnchainLens data shows a whale sent 732,481 VVV tokens (a Base Layer AI token) to Coinbase over the past 24 hours. The deposit is worth $3.03 million, netting the whale a $1.77 million profit. This same whale previously withdrew 763,725 VVV from Coinbase—valued at $1.56 million at the time—and sold the tokens after staking them for six months. Earlier reports noted VVV’s market cap exceeded $530 million, hitting a recent high, with 24-hour trading volume reaching $26.6 million. BlockBeats reminds users: Meme coins often lack practical use cases and have extreme price volatility; investors should exercise caution.

Per OnchainLens monitoring on Feb. 16, a whale has added 371 XAUT gold tokens to its holdings at an average entry price of $5,006. The whale retains $7.8 million in capital and may further expand its position.

February 16 – Per the official website, Kimi (from Under the Dark Side of the Moon) has officially rolled out the **Kimi Claw Beta**, a cloud-native integrated service built on the open-source AI agent framework OpenClaw. Users need no local installation or server configuration—they can run a 24/7 online AI agent directly in a browser tab, or bridge it to their local/third-party OpenClaw instances. Powered by Kimi K2.5 and paired with a practical skill library, the Beta enables agent capabilities like long-term memory and autonomous operation. It’s currently only available to Allegretto members and above.

On February 16, prominent analyst Willy Woo noted that Bitcoin’s 12-year valuation trend relative to gold has recently broken. While BTC’s relative valuation should be higher, it hasn’t materialized—largely due to growing concerns over quantum computing, with markets beginning to price in potential risks in advance. Bitcoin could later be patched with quantum-resistant signatures, but this won’t resolve the issue of ~4 million "lost" BTC (early private keys vulnerable to quantum cracking) re-entering circulation. Woo estimates a 75% probability these lost bitcoins won’t be frozen via a protocol hard fork, so markets need to anticipate sell pressure from the 4 million tokens. Since MicroStrategy began accumulating BTC in 2020, total holdings by corporations and ETFs amount to just 2.8 million BTC. The 4 million lost tokens represent 8 years of corporate accumulation, driving significant supply dilution. Until "Q-Day" (Quantum Computing Threat Implementation Day, expected

As of February 16, per HTX market data, Bittensor (TAO) rallied 7% in the short term driven by its listing on Upbit. The token was last trading at $203, posting a 24-hour gain of 6.64% and a 23% gain over the past week.