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

Garrett Jin, agent of the "BTC OG Insider Whale", posted a statement saying it is time to start re-accumulating ETH during the upcoming consolidation phase and stake it.

OKX Director Lennix was invited to participate in the "The Rise of Financial Super Apps" roundtable forum at Bitcoin Asia 2026, where he shared insights on the integration of traditional finance and crypto markets, the foundational construction of financial super apps, and the development prospects of tokenized stocks. Lennix noted that financial products are accelerating convergence into a unified account system. Going forward, users will expect to trade and manage various categories of financial assets under the same pool of funds, single account, unified margin, and risk control framework—this will be a key direction for the industry’s continuous evolution. He pointed out that while financial super apps superficially allow trading of crypto, traditional stocks, forex, commodities and other assets within one application, the real challenge lies in integrating the underlying infrastructure of these assets: coordination between banking systems, wallets, trading accounts, shared margin, and risk control and compliance backends. Meanwhile, Lennix mentioned that the tokenization of stocks and other traditional financial assets is essentially an upgrade to traditional markets. By connecting such assets to crypto exchanges’ matching, margin, risk control and compliance systems, the market can achieve extended trading and risk management, and continue to provide price signals outside regular trading hours. On institutional partnerships, Lennix stated that Intercontinental Exchange’s strategic investment in the OKX Group reflects the broader financial market’s shift toward tokenization and 24/7 trading. As tokenized stock business continues to grow, this segment is poised to become a major growth area for the future financial market.

Solana development firm Anza announced that the Solana testnet has activated Phase 1 of the SIMD-0437 proposal, officially launching testing of its account rent reduction mechanism. The proposal includes a total of 5 functional gates; only the first is currently active, and not all adjustments have been completed or deployed to the mainnet. Once all 5 phases are finalized, Solana’s per-byte storage parameter lamports_per_byte will drop from 6960 to 696, a total 90% reduction. Taking token accounts as an example, the deposit required to keep an account rent-free is projected to fall from approximately $0.16 to $0.016, cutting costs for account creation and application deployment.

Nvidia’s earnings report has once again become a watershed moment for AI trading in the US stock market. The company’s fiscal Q2 revenue hit $96.2 billion, up 106% year-over-year; data center revenue reached $89 billion, surging 117% YoY. Its fiscal Q3 revenue guidance of $108 billion is above market consensus. More importantly, Nvidia projected its next fiscal year revenue will grow by around 70%, significantly easing market concerns that AI capital expenditure (capex) has peaked. After the earnings release, Wall Street quickly revised up its valuation anchors: Goldman Sachs raised Nvidia’s price target from $285 to $300, Citi from $300 to $315, JPMorgan Chase from $280 to $320, and Bernstein SocGen hiked theirs sharply to $400. Institutions including Mizuho, Stifel, Evercore and Melius also followed suit in raising price targets, indicating the divergence among sell-side analysts on the sustainability of AI chip demand is narrowing. The secondary market reaction was immediate: Nvidia rose 8.7% on Thursday, adding around $441.5 billion in market cap, driving the Nasdaq up 1.6% and the S&P 500 up 0.7. Against the backdrop of previous market skepticism over overheated AI trades, cloud vendors’ capex returns and Nvidia’s complex financing arrangements, this earnings report effectively reinjected confidence into the entire AI infrastructure chain. However, new pricing priorities are emerging. The market will continue to monitor the production ramp of the Rubin platform, whether gross margins can stay at high levels, the recovery of revenue from China’s data centers, and whether Nvidia’s potential balance sheet commitments will rise after it promotes AI data center construction through collaborative financing.

Nvidia’s stock rose 8.7% on Thursday, marking its largest single-day gain since April 2025, driving a roughly $442 billion increase in the company’s market capitalization — the second-largest single-day market cap growth ever for a global individual stock. Nvidia’s total market cap now stands at around $5.5 trillion, remaining the world’s most valuable publicly listed company. This market cap gain is second only to Microsoft’s record single-day increase of $450 billion set less than a month ago, and exceeds the total market capitalization of the vast majority of S&P 500 index constituents. The chipmaker previously saw a $440 billion single-day market cap jump in April 2025, and also suffered a nearly $600 billion single-day wipeout amid market concerns over the DeepSeek model. The stock rally was primarily fueled by the company’s earnings guidance: Nvidia projects its revenue will grow approximately 70% in the next fiscal year, far outpacing the market consensus estimate of around 45%. JPMorgan Chase believes this guidance may still be conservative, as Nvidia explicitly stated its forecast is constrained by supply limits, while the unconstrained potential demand growth rate is higher.

Crypto KOL Ansem says that 2017’s market-favored altcoins are essentially not very different from 2026’s meme coins. He argues that the former are nothing more than "meme coins with whitepapers" that attract investors via founders and project narratives. In contrast, Ansem notes that current meme coins at least openly admit they are trades centered on market attention, rather than attempting to package themselves with complex technology or use case narratives. Based on this assessment, he states his bullishness on meme coins is higher now than ever before.