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

In its latest report, Nomura Securities argues that the core contradiction in the global storage industry remains severe supply shortages, and AI-driven structural demand growth has not yet peaked. Recent investor concerns about oversupply are clearly overblown, and the market’s overreaction may provide a window for the storage sector to re-examine its valuations. Nomura bluntly states in the report that market concerns are greatly exaggerated. The cycle for semiconductor investments to translate into actual production capacity is extremely long: South Korea’s investment plan worth up to 4800 trillion won will take at least 5 to 10 years to materialize into real capacity, and the squeeze on general-purpose storage capacity from high-margin HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) is causing severe supply shortages. Nomura stresses that Meta’s move is by no means a turning point for declining AI-related hardware demand. On the contrary, as current computing power supply shortages have pushed per-token prices upward, Meta’s entry into the computing power market is expected to help stabilize token prices.

Glassnode published a report disclosing that its on-chain metric, the Hyperliquid Entry Price Heatmap, displays traders’ specific position entry prices. Currently, a large volume of long positions in the $72,000–$76,000 range and short positions established around $60,000 are in unrealized losses, leaving the Bitcoin market highly vulnerable to both upward and downward price swings. Price fluctuations could further trigger cascading liquidations.

Blockchain security firm Hexens has disclosed a critical vulnerability in Aptos’ Move virtual machine, detected in February this year, that theoretically could put roughly $70 billion in crypto assets at risk. However, the Aptos team patched the mainnet within hours of the vulnerability being disclosed, with no user funds lost. Hexens said the flaw stems from a "stale-cache" issue in the Move VM, which can cause type confusion, letting attackers seize critical permissions including stablecoin minting, cross-chain bridges, and DeFi protocols. In simulation tests, the research team used only a ~$3,000 server to set up the environment, hitting a ~90% attack success rate without requiring validator node permissions or internal access. Aptos responded that it fixed the issue rapidly after receiving the report through its bug bounty program, adding that the vulnerability has very low exploitability in real-world networks and poses no actual harm to users or funds. Hexens warned that malicious exploitation could extend risks beyond the Aptos ecosystem to infrastructure like cross-chain bridges, stablecoins, and centralized exchanges. Independent security firm Grego AI estimates that roughly $250 million in total value locked (TVL) on the Aptos chain was directly affected, with the overall theoretical risk exposure peaking at around $70 billion.

Per monitoring by OnchainLens, whale address 0x2117 saw its 40x leveraged Bitcoin short positions partially liquidated four times in the past 24 hours. The address has had a total of 97.99 BTC liquidated, worth approximately $6.18 million, with a cumulative realized loss of around $298,800. Even so, the trader still holds 67.98 BTC (valued at roughly $4.26 million) in 40x leveraged short positions, with a current unrealized loss of about $179,200. Its liquidation price is only approximately $902 higher than the current BTC market price.

According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, the address "9oxDc" sold 8.06 million ANSEM tokens approximately 17 days ago at a price of $974.81. At the time of the sale, the project’s market cap stood at roughly $54,000 to $134,000. With ANSEM’s price surging sharply, the batch of tokens is now valued at around $2.39 million. Based on current prices, the trader missed out on approximately $2.389 million in potential profits due to selling too early.

This week, the digital asset industry’s discussions centered on topics including AI, the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, stablecoins, and Bitcoin. On the AI front, multiple industry insiders noted that current market capital is shifting from digital assets to AI infrastructure development, and future value in the AI sector may be captured more by application layers and infrastructure providers rather than just large language model developers. Additionally, some argue that if the U.S. government acquires equity in OpenAI, it could further exacerbate the trend of centralization in the AI industry. On the regulatory side, as MiCA’s transition period has officially ended, EU crypto asset service providers must now obtain full MiCA licenses to continue operating. Industry players believe that regulatory compliance will gradually become a key competitive advantage for crypto payment and digital asset service providers in Europe. Regarding stablecoins, the industry continues to focus on the newly launched Open USD (OUSD). Analysts believe its ecosystem, involving over 140 institutions including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, and BNY, is poised to challenge the existing stablecoin market landscape (such as USDC) by leveraging distribution advantages. However, some point out that OUSD still faces challenges including liquidity cultivation and governance coordination. On the Bitcoin front, market views are divided over recent capital operations by Michael Saylor’s firm Strategy. Some analysts argue that the company’s recent financing arrangements mean it may still sell Bitcoin to meet future funding needs; others believe the move effectively eases market concerns about its liquidity and default risks, representing a positive risk management measure.