Crypto Daily — DeFi, NFT, Web3

💰 The OKX exchange announced the launch of an updated mobile app, in which centralized (CEX) and decentralized (DEX) trading are combined in one interface. Users get access to millions of tokens on Solana, Base, and X Layer, including projects that have not yet appeared on major exchanges. The app supports automatic selection of the best prices among more than 100 liquidity pools, provides asset management through passkey and onchain recovery, and uses a fixed 0.85% fee with no additional gas costs. The new functionality is already available to OKX users worldwide.

🇫🇷 The French court has completely lifted the travel ban on Pavel Durov, and also canceled the requirement to regularly report to the local police station.

🇨🇿 The Czech National Bank created a test cryptocurrency portfolio worth $1,000,000, including Bitcoin, stablecoins, and tokenized deposits.

💰 Activity on the Solana network has dropped to a yearly low — the number of active wallets has decreased to 3.3 million, nearly three times less than the January peak. The decline in interest in shitcoins has led to reduced user activity, although Solana still maintains strong positions in DeFi with a total liquidity of about $10 billion. Experts note that dependence on a single trend makes the ecosystem vulnerable to changes in market sentiment.

👻 Today the Fear and Greed Index has dropped to 15 — extreme fear.

On Hyperliquid trading of NVIDIA shares has been launched.

😂 Mega-investor Robert Kiyosaki stated that he owes the bank $1.2 billion, but it doesn't bother him. “If I go bankrupt, that's not my problem — it's the bank's problem”.

🧬 IBM announced major progress in the development of quantum processors — the company introduced the Nighthawk chip with more complex circuits and reduced error rates, as well as the experimental Loon processor aimed at creating fault-tolerant quantum systems. IBM also stated that it managed to speed up error correction by 10 times and doubled chip production rates after moving manufacturing to a new factory in New York. Previously, the 133-qubit quantum computer from IBM was able to break a toy 6-bit ECC key.

⌨️ For the third time, Hyperliquid finds itself at the center of a loud incident — the exchange suspended deposits and withdrawals after a large-scale manipulation of the POPCAT token. An unknown trader withdrew $3 million from OKX, transferred it to Hyperliquid, and began actively opening long positions on POPCAT, driving up the price. To create the illusion of high demand, he placed a huge "wall" of buy orders at $0.21 totaling about $30 million — but later suddenly removed it. The price crashed, positions were liquidated, the trader lost his collateral, and the HLP liquidity system lost nearly $5 million.

🗽 The US government has started working again — Donald Trump signed the H.R. 5371 law and officially ended the record shutdown. Funding for government agencies has been extended until January 30, 2026. The shutdown lasted 43 days — the longest shutdown in the country's history.

🇦🇪 Dubai court froze $456,000,000 linked to Justin Sun and the stablecoin TrueUSD. The money that was supposed to be held in reserve, according to the investigation, was spent on third-party deals and loans — which could have caused problems with payments to users for the project.

🇹🇼 Taiwan will study the use of Bitcoin as a strategic asset and will launch a pilot BTC storage from confiscated funds. The decision was made by the Prime Minister and the country's Central Bank.

🇺🇸 The SEC is considering creating exceptions for tokens classified as securities. The commission chairman, Paul Atkins, stated that the agency is developing a new classification of crypto assets to separate them by legal status. Even if a token initially falls under the Howey test, over time it may lose its characteristics as a security as the project decentralizes.

🇰🇬Kyrgyzstan has issued 50,140,738 USDKG, backed by gold and pegged to the US dollar at a nominal value of $1 per unit — the issuer is a state-controlled company. The Ministry of Finance plans to allocate up to $500 million to back the token, and later increase reserves to $2 billion. Kyrgyzstan has also banned mining across the country amid a growing electricity shortage.

🎖️ CoinDesk published the annual Exchange Benchmark 2025, in which Binance took first place among centralized exchanges and received the highest rating of AA — the only platform to score over 90 points in both spot (93.4) and derivatives trading (93.65). Analysts note that the crypto exchange sector is showing steady growth in maturity and transparency: nearly 60% of platforms operate under regulatory supervision, and more companies are publishing Proof-of-Reserves and reports. According to CoinDesk, major exchanges today are becoming more reliable and institutionally resilient than five years ago.

⚡ Circle, the issuer of USDC, plans to launch a native coin for its own ARC blockchain. Recently, we wrote that Circle is starting testing of the ARC blockchain with major institutions, including BlackRock, Visa, AWS, and Anthropic.

🐳 Japanese giant SoftBank sold all its NVIDIA shares worth $5.83 billion to finance investments in OpenAI — the sale was part of an "asset monetization" strategy to prepare the company for a $40 billion investment in the ChatGPT developer by the end of the year.

💰 Peter Thiel, the legendary investor who was behind the creation of PayPal and Facebook, stated that Bitcoin has effectively been "appropriated" by major financial institutions and the government. According to him, the ideological essence of cryptocurrencies — cypherpunk anarchism and decentralization — has been lost: today BTC is even convenient for the FBI, which indicates complete institutionalization. Thiel admitted that he still holds a small position but has lost confidence in BTC as a tool of freedom: "It seems we got not a revolution, but an ETF from BlackRock."

🇺🇸 The fifth statue of Satoshi Nakamoto has been installed in Miami (USA).

🌐 SWIFT completes the transition to the ISO 20022 standard, designed to increase the speed and quality of international payments — the new format simplifies the interaction of banking systems with digital technologies, including blockchain-based solutions.