On January 27th, the native AI platform for encryption, imgnAI, completed a seed round of financing of $1.6 million, with Hack VC leading the investment and Rana Capital, Selini Capital, West Ham Capital, Motus Capital and dao5 participating, with undisclosed valuation.

On January 25th, Bitget released its latest research report. Between 2020 and 2023, bank revenues sharply declined, resulting in over 70,000 job cuts. Bitget's report data reflects the outflow of bank employees, with 33% of resumes coming from the banking industry in 2023 alone. The most common positions include investment relations, identity authentication and compliance, data analysis, product design, backend engineers, and other mid to senior level positions in various fields. The high salaries and remote work of the blockchain industry also attract bank personnel to join. In 2022, 36% of blockchain-related positions are remote positions, which is twice as high as the global average of 16%. As for salaries, the average salary in banks is $54,000, while the average salary in cryptocurrency companies is about $115,667. In addition, the report data shows that giants such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup have successively included the development of decentralized technology applications in their plans. It is expected that between 2025 and 2026, the banking industry's spending on blockchain will reach $22.5 billion. Therefore, high salaries, innovative prospects, and flexibility are the main reasons why talent in the traditional financial industry is migrating to the cryptocurrency field.

The Federal Court of Canada has ruled that the government's previous freezing of cryptocurrency donations to protesting truck drivers was unconstitutional. During the protest, truck drivers used their vehicles to block streets in the country's capital, Ottawa, to protest the requirement for truck drivers crossing the Canada-US border to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Protesters received millions of dollars in donations through cryptocurrency.

International Energy Agency predicts in its latest report that global electricity demand for data centers, cryptocurrency mining, and artificial intelligence may double in the next three years, equivalent to all of Germany's electricity needs.

The cryptocurrency market saw a major drop on January 22, resulting in over $100 million being liquidated in the past 24 hours due to investors taking profits and speculating on future market performance. Ethereum was the top cryptocurrency in terms of individual liquidations, with $22.94 million, followed closely by Bitcoin at $20.75 million and Solana at $6.53 million. Experts attribute the dip to profit-taking opportunities and traders assessing market conditions ahead of the release of Q4 prelim U.S. GDP Data and PCE inflation data this week. The global crypto market fell by 3.16% to $1.59 trillion, with overall trading volume increasing by 34.50% to $42.49 billion. Additionally, Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein disagrees that high fees for GBTC are causing significant liquidations, while Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz believes investors will shift towards other ETFs like $BTCO. Binance has also announced a large-scale token burn across various chains.

According to insiders, the US authorities are investigating the transactions between investment bank B. Riley Financial Inc. and a major client involved in securities fraud, as well as the use of this client's assets to help the investment bank obtain a loan from Nomura Holdings Inc. The spokesperson for the US Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment, and the investigation is still in its early stages. The agency's review does not necessarily mean that anyone has engaged in any improper behavior, nor does it necessarily mean that legal action will be taken, and Nomura Securities is not the focus of the investigation. A spokesperson for B. Riley stated in an email statement that they have not received any information from the SEC regarding this matter, and they will fully cooperate if the SEC conducts an investigation.

One question that I often get when discussing consumer app ideas leveraging crypto is “does this really have to be in web3”? This often leads to an exposition on how building a web2 counterpart would be substantially difficult or simply not work. The intention of this post is to provide a comprehensive analysis on game theory and its applications in web3. Game theory is a more generalized approach and covers governance, token models, decentralization et al. I believe this new framework can be leveraged to build powerful applications. The right incentives can propel the society in a good direction.

According to a report by Chainalysis, the vast majority of cryptocurrency transactions (about 99.6%) are used for legitimate purposes. In 2023, illegal cryptocurrency transactions accounted for only 0.34% of all cryptocurrency transactions, lower than 0.42% in 2022 and significantly lower than 1.3% in 2019. The report only focuses on funds stolen by cryptocurrency hackers and those identified as illegal addresses. Despite the decrease, it is worth emphasizing that compared to illegal activities in the broader financial industry, cryptocurrency-related crimes are still small.

1.The implied volatility of Bitcoin options this week exceeded 97%, which has tripled from the low of about 30% in October last year.

According to official sources, in the recently completed Archway community's second quadratic funding round, the quadratic funding pool reached 300k ARCH, with 248 community members casting 23,352 votes and contributing 23,117.6 ARCH. Projects supported by the community include NodeOps, Gelotto, Astrovault, SudoStake, Aeroscraper, Nomos, PeerSwap, Abstract SDK, Liquid Finance, Archway.fun, Pina Colada, and MC² Finance. This second quadratic funding round is the first large-scale native quadratic funding round in the Cosmos ecosystem, completed through the infrastructure provided by DoraHacks.io. Archway's successful second quadratic funding round provides a good foundation for larger-scale quadratic funding rounds for application chain ecosystems.