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

According to Iran's Fars News Agency, the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council stated that the United States' response to Iran's latest proposal is "insufficient". The U.S. needs to clarify issues that remain unclear to the Iranian side. The U.S. has accepted some of our conditions, while other issues remain unclear.

Papertrade’s official response to allegations of price manipulation exploits and critical protocol vulnerabilities states that it has never been feasible to grant equal priority to small and large orders. Doing so would lead to front-end congestion from spam transactions—a far worse outcome than the current queuing mechanism. Against these constraints, the team has designed the fair launch to be as inclusive as possible. Last night’s manipulation attempt targeting the BTC/ETH pair on Hyperliquid’s Best Bid Offer (BBO) was not a flaw in the six-month-developed mechanism. Such scenarios were already accounted for; the incident only occurred because position limits were set very loosely during the early launch phase to mitigate congestion. Had position limits been imposed during peak queuing demand, it would have only exacerbated slow user experiences. The queuing mechanism itself, due to uncertainty in entry/exit confirmation times, actually provides natural protection against manipulation. As congestion eases, the team has begun tightening position limits at both on-chain and relay levels. In such a system, manipulation attacks are always possible—the key is whether such attempts are economically viable. The official goal is to set parameters such that manipulation is almost never profitable. Even if successful, tail risks are extremely high, and the expected value is negative.

Crypto analyst Darkfost notes that approximately 53% of total invested capital is concentrated above Bitcoin’s current price level of around $83,000, meaning buying Bitcoin at this level would put your holding cost lower than more than half of existing investors. The $84,000–$85,000 range is the largest cluster of trading positions; many investors react at this key level, making it Bitcoin’s core resistance that it must break through. Moving lower, the $79,000–$77,000 range may act as a support level. If the price fails to effectively break through the $84,000–$85,000 range, the market may first retest this support zone. Once the price breaks above this dense position cluster with significant trading volume and holds steady there, it will mean the cost pressure for most existing holders has been absorbed, and subsequent upward resistance will ease noticeably.

Bitcoin treasury firm Strive CEO Matt Cole, following in Michael Saylor’s footsteps, has released details related to a Bitcoin tracker. He stated “Think ?igger,” hinting that he will announce another Bitcoin purchase next week. Earlier on October 5, Matt Cole disclosed that Strive bought 2,000 BTC at an average price of $84,422 per coin, totaling approximately $169 million, bringing the company’s total Bitcoin holdings to 29,462 coins.

Onchain derivatives protocol Variational, built on Arbitrum, has announced a campaign to distribute over $1 million and 150,000 platform points to the chain’s top 10,000 most active perpetual contract traders (excluding market makers) to attract their onboarding. Eligible traders can receive up to 3,000 Variational points, while referrers are entitled to up to $15,000 in rewards. More than 750 new users have already registered via the initiative. On September 24, Variational unveiled its VAR tokenomics: 32% of total tokens will be allocated to a genesis airdrop (distributed proportionally to users’ points, fully unlocked at TGE), 18% to ecosystem reserves (managed by the foundation), and 50% to the team and investors (locked for 12 months post-TGE, then linearly unlocked over a minimum of 3 years). The team plans to hold its token generation event (TGE) in Q4, and will continue distributing 150,000 points weekly until then. Additional airdrop terms include: a minimum of 1 point is required to claim; unclaimed airdrop allocations will be burned; and 100% of protocol revenue will be used for VAR buybacks and burns.

On-chain analyst Specter has pointed out that Arkham incorrectly tagged a THORChain wallet address as linked to the CryptoBillis Ledger hack, which caused crypto security firm PeckShield to mistakenly assert that the CryptoBillis Ledger attacker had deposited approximately $3.89 million in crypto assets to Binance over the past two days. PeckShieldAlert has responded that it will correct the related labels.