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

On-chain analyst Ai Yi (@ai_9684xtpa) has tracked that the so-called "UBTC-to-ETH whale" has rebalanced its holdings again after a 5-day gap. In the past hour, the whale converted BTC into 3,038.73 ETH via three addresses, worth approximately $7.5 million. Since October 11, the whale has accumulated over 46,103.3 ETH through such swaps, totaling more than $115 million with an average swap price of $2,513.11.

Beating AI Express News: Arda, the AI company founded by former OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, has officially debuted, announcing the completion of a $160 million Series A funding round that values the company at $1.5 billion. The round was co-led by Altimeter, Accel, and Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to $232 million after a prior $72 million seed round. In March this year, The Wall Street Journal reported Arda was seeking funding at a $700 million valuation, which has now doubled. Arda builds AI agents for manufacturing engineers, acting as a factory equivalent of Claude Code. Engineers upload CAD drawings and design documents, and the AI can plan assembly sequences, arrange workstations, draft operation instructions, and update production plans following design changes. U.S. defense tech firm Anduril has integrated Arda into its ArsenalOS manufacturing system. According to disclosures from both sides, basic work instructions that previously took 10 hours to compile now only take 15 minutes; complex engineering processes have been shortened from up to 30 hours to around 2.5 hours. McGrew pointed out that workers can learn a new process in a day, but adapting traditional automated production lines to new designs usually takes 3 to 6 months. Arda’s next move is to let AI directly program and adjust industrial robots, cutting production line reconfiguration cycles to days. However, this capability is still in prototype development, and the products currently in use mainly serve manual assembly lines.

Solana development team Anza announced in a post that its new consensus protocol Alpenglow has launched on Solana’s mainnet-beta, reducing transaction finalization time from 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Alpenglow’s genesis block has been generated, and the original consensus mechanism TowerBFT is now officially retired.

Dongcha Beating AI Flash News: ElevenLabs has launched Eleven Realtime, a real-time voice model available in two versions: Mini and Max. Mini is optimized for low-cost conversational scenarios, while Max is tailored for customer service and complex tasks requiring continuous tool integration. Both models support over 90 languages and more than 17,000 voice profiles. In Artificial Analysis’s 1,000-voice inference benchmark, Max achieved a 98.8% accuracy rate, with an average response time of 0.57 seconds. On the same leaderboard, Qwen Audio 3.0 Realtime Plus posted a slightly higher accuracy of 99.2%, but its average time to first response was 1.54 seconds. Building a voice agent usually requires developers to separately connect speech recognition, large language models, and text-to-speech systems, plus debug pauses, turn-taking, and interruption handling. Eleven Realtime unifies and optimizes these components, removing the need for piecemeal integration. While the underlying architecture still relies on multiple connected models, developers cannot select individual models when using Realtime mode. The new model is now being rolled out via ElevenAgents and the Realtime API, with access gradually expanding. The API is compatible with OpenAI’s WebSocket protocol, enabling developers to reuse existing SDKs; projects using WebRTC will need to adjust their connection methods first.

Bankless co-founder David Hoffman has once again released a bullish piece on ZEC, forecasting that it will hit 10% of Bitcoin's market cap in the current cycle and 25% in the next cycle.

SpaceX (SPCX) has given a strong boost to AI-themed trading. Overnight, the rocket company led by Elon Musk reported revenue that exceeded Wall Street expectations, with its AI business contributing to the top line, leading to a sharp rise in its stock price. The firm also hinted at a potential merger with Tesla (TSLA); if completed, the deal would unite Musk’s largest business entities, marking the largest transaction in history. According to market data from BIT (bit.com), the stock rallied at the opening, surging more than 10% at one point.