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

According to HTX market data, AVAX briefly surged past $10, now trading at $9.958, with a 24-hour gain of 19.68%.

Privacy public blockchain Midnight’s Chief Technology Officer Sebastien Guillemot stated in a post that Midnight’s mainnet is soon to open smart contract deployment, enabling users to deploy privacy smart contracts and create custom privacy tokens. Development work will continue advancing after the mainnet rolls out smart contract deployment. Currently, the testnet is running the next version of smart contracts, with added features including events and composability; the team is working to deploy these features to the mainnet in subsequent upgrades. Guillemot added that users can create their own tokens and trade them between privacy ledgers and public ledgers. Once live, these tokens can integrate with select DeFi functions via Offer Files, and will unlock more use cases as composable smart contract upgrades roll out.

Universal officially announced that due to user adoption failing to reach the level required for long-term protocol sustainability over the past two years, the team has decided to gradually wind down the Universal protocol. The protocol will remain fully operational for the next 60 days, with existing infrastructure and underlying asset support for uAssets unaffected. The wind-down period will last until November 17, 2026. During this period, users can sell uAssets via the Universal app or directly redeem underlying assets through the minting and redemption interface; large redemptions can be processed by contacting the team. After November 17, the protocol will officially shut down, and remaining uAssets will be redeemed via smart contracts. Per current plans, uSOL, uXRP, uDOGE, uADA, uBTC, and uLTC on Base will each be converted to their corresponding bridged assets, while other uAssets will be converted to USDC. Final redemption assets and smart contract details will be announced before the shutdown. Universal noted that over the past two years, the protocol has supported more than 80 assets, facilitated their entry into various blockchain ecosystems, and promoted cross-ecosystem transactions, but ultimately failed to meet expected adoption levels, leading to the decision to cease operations.

MultiversX (EGLD) released an official announcement confirming that attackers attempted to exploit a VM-level atomicity issue, which caused invalid state changes on the network. Currently, network operations have been suspended to prevent the incident from further escalating. The development team has prepared a fix, which will be verified in a shadow fork environment. After successful testing, the team will coordinate with validators, exchanges, and infrastructure partners to deploy the fix to the mainnet. The official noted that the team is currently evaluating targeted recovery plans, which will retain confirmed transaction histories and normal user states while only addressing invalid state changes related to this incident. Users do not need to take any action. Until the official recovery notification is released, please do not submit or rebroadcast transactions, nor deposit or withdraw EGLD and ESDT assets via trading platforms or cross-chain bridges. Once the incident is resolved and investigation results are confirmed, MultiversX will publish a full technical report.

According to Yu Jing Monitoring, four hours after AKE saw a 115% price spike, the entity presumed to be AKE’s active market maker withdrew 216 million AKE tokens (valued at roughly $13.83 million) from Binance Alpha. It currently holds at least 12.4 billion AKE tokens on-chain, worth approximately $803 million, accounting for 54% of the token’s circulating supply. The same active market maker is likely behind B2’s sharp rally yesterday.

Kalshi has applied to launch perpetual futures contracts tied to individual U.S. stocks, joining Coinbase in efforts to bring crypto-style derivatives into the traditional stock market. The prediction market platform filed a proposed rule change with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday, and submitted the related proposal for approval to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The CFTC has not yet approved the proposal. The proposed contracts will have no preset expiration dates, and will align their prices with their underlying stocks via periodic funding rate payments between long and short positions. Kalshi said these contracts will be classified as securities futures products, and will be cleared through Kalshi Klear, its CFTC-registered clearing house. The application was filed on the same day Coinbase submitted its own proposal to launch U.S. individual stock perpetual futures, with both companies aiming to bring this popular crypto-market derivative to the traditional stock market.