MarketWhisper

Zcash, Monero, Dash demonstrate strong performance under macro pressures. Concerns over the US shutdown, the Bank of Japan's readiness to intervene, and the US dollar recording its largest decline in May. History shows that privacy coins outperform Bitcoin during risk-off periods. ZEC wedges near $345 support, aiming to reach $661; DASH holds at $58, aiming to rise to $71; XMR supports at $450, with targets between $515 and $590.

The size of crypto twitter community reaches 60-80M engaged users driven by 2-6M content creators, with 25-30M daily active crypto users. X dominates as the primary platform for 41.7% of crypto participants, generating 800,000 to 1M daily tweets about cryptocurrency.

Agora CEO Nick van Eck states that stablecoins are shifting towards enterprise payments, focusing on payroll, B2B, and cross-border transactions. Saving 1% in revenue is equivalent to a 5% EBITDA, but corporate awareness is only at 5%. It is predicted that Circle Arc, Base, and Tempo will dominate. Agora aims to be among the top five stablecoin issuers.

Crypto Rover Twitter, followed by hundreds of thousands, faces ZachXBT allegations of pump-and-dump schemes including secretly buying Stoned Pepe tokens before promoting them, accepting $10,000 for undelivered promotions, and dumping tokens after promising to hold. Crypto Rover deleted his Telegram channel after the February 20, 2024 exposé.

Bobby Jain launched Jain Global in July 2024 with $5.3B, the largest hedge fund debut since 2018. However, the fund gained just 2.7% through June 2025, lagging Citadel's 9.3% and Millennium's 9.9%, though Bobby Jain has leveraged assets to $19B with 350 employees globally.

Gold vs silver vs Bitcoin represents the store-of-value debate. Bitcoin is digital with 21M fixed supply; gold has the longest inflation hedge track record; silver serves as both precious metal and industrial commodity. Smart investors diversify across all three for balanced risk-opportunity exposure.

The Federal Reserve will hold a meeting on January 27-28, with CME showing a 95.6% probability of maintaining interest rates. November PCE inflation was 2.8%, well above the 2% target, making a pause in rate cuts a certainty. Bitcoin fluctuated between 80,000 and 90,000 USD, down 7.3% for the week, with no gains for the year, contrasting with gold reaching new highs. Trump threatened to impose 100% tariffs on Canada. AI stocks sold off, with META down 12.4% and NVIDIA down 9.5%.

Binance founder CZ Davos predicts that in 2026, Bitcoin will enter a super cycle, potentially breaking the four-year cycle. He admits to having experienced trading losses and now only holds BTC and BNB, adopting a buy-and-hold strategy. The United States strongly supports cryptocurrencies, and other countries are following suit. The current institutional and policy environment may change the market structure.

Polymarket shows the probability of the US government shutting down at the end of the month skyrocketing from 9% to 79%, with the crypto market losing 30 billion USD over the weekend and over 600 million in long positions liquidated. The cause is that the continuing resolution was only extended until January 30, with Democrats opposing Homeland Security funding after ICE shot and killed two citizens. The background involves a Somali immigrant scam confirmed at 240 million USD, possibly reaching 9 billion USD, with Trump deploying 2,000 agents for law enforcement.

82-year-old netizen mr_ntmy has been buying TSMC every day before dating since June 2024. After holding for 577 days, he gained a profit of 404,000 yuan with 913 shares (return of 42.31%). On the 458th day, he broke one million, adding 10 shares each month. A livestock owner from Tainan, he has been serializing his story on Threads, joking that he has formed a long-term relationship with TSMC.

Blockchain security company CertiK is evaluating an IPO, with founder Gu Ronghui describing it as a pursuit of direction at Davos. In 2022, the valuation reached $2 billion, with Binance as the largest backer. The news exposure triggered a rebound, with Pumpcade founder stating, "Would rather not cooperate even with Kim Jong-un," listing accusations including the Kraken $3 million incident, funds entering Tornado Cash, exploiting vulnerability reports, and pressure from low ratings.

American extreme climber Alex Honnold challenged Taipei 101 on January 25, taking 91 minutes to reach the top of 508 meters during a live stream on Netflix. Polymarket's prediction of the "1 hour 30-45 minutes" option accurately hit with $548,000, but the use of a rope ladder at the tower's tip sparked controversy. Scholars say this event reflects Taiwan's desire to be "seen by the world."

Tezos will implement the Tallinn protocol upgrade on Saturday, reducing block time from the original level to 6 seconds. This is the 20th major update since the protocol's launch in 2018, and it will be a network upgrade without a fork. The upgrade introduces BLS cryptographic signature aggregation technology, allowing all validators to verify each block, and improves address indexing mechanism to increase storage efficiency by 100 times. This upgrade reduces latency and accelerates final confirmation speed, paving the way for further shortening of block time.

Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante states that Solana is shifting from NFT and gaming to DeFi and payments. Despite the low prices, Wall Street remains highly interested in tokenization, stablecoins, and on-chain settlement. Solana positions itself as a neutral settlement layer, emphasizing that compliance is a prerequisite.

Pi App Studio launches no-code payment integration, now live on the testnet. AI-guided steps support conversational payment modes such as game continuation. Creators can build applications and set prices in the Pi browser, with earnings limited to Test Pi; mainnet transfers are not supported.

Russia lists WhiteBit as an "unwanted organization," accusing it of transferring $11 million to the Ukrainian military (spending $900,000 on drones) and supporting the United24 platform. WhiteBit has 8 million users, with daily trading volume of $11 billion. Russia's new regulation limits non-professional investors to 300,000 rubles annually, effective July 2027.

The Qi Zhiming case will be heard at the UK High Court on January 21. The procedural hearing will debate who represents the Chinese victims, with the judge warning of "over-proxying." On January 24, the prosecution ordered co-conspirator Sen Hok Ling to pay $7.6 million within three months or face an additional 8 years of imprisonment. Ling transferred 83.7 BTC and has been sentenced to 4 years. The 61,000 BTC is the largest seizure in UK history, with a continued hearing scheduled for February 16-17.

"Brother Maqi" Huang Licheng suffered two liquidation losses totaling $580,000 on January 25-26. After liquidation, he immediately reopened a 25x leveraged ETH long position, which was liquidated again. Year-to-date loss is $25 million. With 9,990 ETH spot holdings, total assets amount to $130 million.

Japan plans to include XRP in the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act in Q2 2026, implementing a 20% unified capital gains tax. Banks will be able to seamlessly integrate XRP as a payment settlement asset, and XRP has already dominated Japan's remittance infrastructure. This classification could enhance liquidity and set a global standard for crypto governance.

a16z Crypto points out that the threat of quantum computing is exaggerated, and the likelihood of CRQC (cryptography-related quantum computers) appearing before 2030 is extremely low. Digital signatures and zkSNARKs are not vulnerable to "collect first, crack later" attacks, and switching too early may introduce risks. The current threats are code vulnerabilities and governance difficulties, and it is recommended to prioritize auditing and testing rather than rushing to upgrade.