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

**Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan: Sustained Bitcoin ETF Demand Could Spark Parabolic Surge, Echoing 2025 Gold Trend** On January 14, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan posted: *“If Bitcoin ETF demand holds long-term, BTC prices could rise parabolically—mirroring gold’s 2025 performance. Both assets’ prices are fundamentally driven by supply and demand. The mainstream view links gold’s 65% 2025 annual surge to massive central bank purchases that shifted the supply-demand dynamic, and Bitcoin is now in the early stages of this same pattern.”* Central bank gold purchases spiked in 2022, following the U.S. freezing and seizing of Russian Treasury assets. Annual buys jumped from ~500 tons to ~1,000 tons, where they’ve stayed. These purchases shifted the balance but didn’t immediately lift prices: gold rose just 2% in 2022, 13% in 2023, and 27% in 2024. It wasn’t until 2025 that gold entered a true parabolic uptrend. The catalyst? Early on, central banks’ extra demand was soaked

January 14th – Brian Martin, ANZ Bank’s Chief Economist for G3 Economies, said the Federal Reserve may hold interest rates steady in January but argued a prolonged pause in its rate-cutting cycle is unfounded. He added the Fed should quickly resume rate cuts, with the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) expected to deliver 25-basis-point cuts in March and June, pushing the federal funds target range to 3.00%-3.25% by mid-year. Martin noted U.S. inflation will gradually moderate in 2026 as the impact of prior tariffs on prices fades, wage growth slows, and housing inflation cools.

On January 14, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a post reflecting on the 2014 blockchain vision: Back then, the goal was to build permissionless decentralized applications (dApps) atop a set of technologies—apps supporting finance, social media, ride-sharing, organizational governance, crowdfunding, and even a potential alternative network. Over the past five years, this core vision has at times blurred, with various "meta-narratives" and "themes" taking center stage. But the vision never died; in fact, the underlying tech powering it is growing increasingly robust. Vitalik noted that in 2014, dApps were still just toys, far harder to use than today’s Web2 tools. By 2026, Fileverse has become user-friendly enough that he frequently uses it for document writing and collaboration. "The decentralized renaissance is on the horizon—and you can be part of it," he added.

On January 14, sources told Reuters that Pakistan has signed an agreement with a World Liberty Financial-affiliated company to explore using the firm’s stablecoin for cross-border payments. World Liberty Financial — the primary crypto-financial business owned by the family of U.S. President Donald Trump — launched in September 2024. This partnership is among the first publicly announced collaborations between World Liberty and a sovereign nation.

January 14th: Per HyperInsight monitoring, the "mid-term swing" whale address 0x08bed closed a 60 BTC long position at 14:14, netting $142k in profits. The address currently holds no open positions and is on the sidelines. This address uses high-leverage isolated margin trading, with an average holding period of 3-7 days—aligning with a mid-term swing trading style.

January 14 – Solana-based social token platform Believe App has rolled out its v2 beta iOS version, introducing a "Human Sentiment Market" trading mechanism: Users can perpetually bet on the rise or fall of an individual’s reputation using two tokens—Believe and Doubt. The first market centers on founder Ben Pasternak, with a current "belief value" of 62%. This market never settles, and the combined value of Believe and Doubt tokens always equals $1. The project team stated that initially, it will focus on manually listing high-profile figures, with plans to later expand to any X account and launch a fee-sharing model. Overall, this version aims to act as an entry point centered on "real-time sentiment tracking," streamlining the shift from meme tokens to prediction markets.