January 18th, according to Cointelegraph, Web3 security platform Immunefi CEO Mitchell Amador stated that nearly 80% of crypto projects that have experienced a major hack have never fully recovered. Most protocols are fundamentally unaware of the level of risk they face from hacking and are not prepared operationally for a major security event.Mitchell Amador said that the first few hours after a vulnerability occurs are usually the most destructive. Without a pre-established incident response plan, teams hesitate, argue about the next steps, and underestimate the potential depth of the vulnerability's impact. This period is often a critical moment when additional losses occur.Out of concern for reputational damage, project teams often hesitate to pause smart contracts and completely cut off communication with users. Maintaining silence often exacerbates panic rather than containing the problem. Nearly 80% of projects that have been hacked have never fully recovered, primarily because of the breakdown in operations and trust systems during the response process.

January 18, Strategy founder Michael Saylor announced that the "BTC Rating" metric has been added to the Strategy website. The "BTC Rating" for MSTR is 0.9.Strategy's Bitcoin Product Strategy Lead, Chaitanya Jain, explained that the calculation formula for MSTR's "BTC Rating" metric is: (Bitcoin Reserves - Debt - Preferred Stock + USD Reserves) / Market Cap, representing the ratio of Bitcoin net reserves to the company's market capitalization, essentially the inverse of the Price-to-Book ratio.

January 18th, the CAT Terminal community announced a strategic partnership with the PinPet platform, jointly launching the CAT Node NFT Universe Node Platform, aiming to build a high-quality, sustainable Web3 encrypted community ecosystem.PinPet is a next-generation leverage trading DEX based on Solana, equipped with the world's first Fusion Engine, integrating AMM spot trading, automatic liquidity pool, and multiple risk control mechanisms in an atomic way to achieve coin issuance, spot trading, and long/short leverage in one go. The platform supports zero-threshold coin issuance and instant 3x–10x leverage trading, providing users with bi-directional transaction capabilities to enhance capital efficiency and trading flexibility.CAT Terminal was fairly launched on the PumpFun platform, integrating Web3 and AI power models, jointly driven by decentralized communities from regions such as Dubai, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. The current community user base has exceeded 17,000 and has received strategic investments from multiple crypto institutions, committed to growing into a "super meme" ecosystem with long-term viability that transcends bull and bear markets.It is reported that the CAT Node platform launched in this cooperation has officially gone live and simultaneously initiated ecosystem node recruitment, including 200 Honor Nodes and 2000 Cornerstone Nodes. CAT Node will further build Solana's first AI NFT Universe Node Platform, driving community co-construction, ecosystem incentives, and value accumulation through a node mechanism.

January 18th, CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost stated, "Bitcoin's next major challenge is to reclaim the cost basis of early long-term holders (held for 6 to 12 months), currently around $101,000. The cost basis of long-term holders for 12 to 18 months is around $81,700, which forms a key support level. If Bitcoin were to fall back to this range, these holders are likely to hold onto their average entry price. Investors who bought near the January 2025 high are still holding their positions."On the upside, there is resistance around $114,650, corresponding to the cost basis of short-term holders (held for 3-6 months). This group significantly accumulated near the highs, and if the price returns to this range, some investors may choose to sell near the breakeven point."

January 18th, according to Etherscan data, the daily transaction count on the Ethereum network hit a record high on January 16th, reaching 2.88 million transactions.

January 18th, according to HyperInsight monitoring, the 「BTC OG Insider Whale」 long position total value is about $910 million, has already paid over $7.5 million in funding fees, and the unrealized gain has narrowed to $44.9 million, previously once peaking above $60 million. As of the time of publication, the position's unrealized gains are as follows:· $741 million ETH long position: $35.14 million unrealized gain;· $95.12 million BTC long position: $3.61 million unrealized gain;· $72.73 million SOL long position: $6.14 million unrealized gain.

January 18th, according to Hyperinsight monitoring, "Brother Ma" Huang Licheng's address increased his ZEC long position by about $246,000 in the past 3 hours. This replenishment lowered his average holding cost from $415 to $411.29, with a current unrealized loss of $48,100. At the same time, Huang Licheng has partially taken profit on his HYPE and ETH long positions, realizing a small profit.Currently, he still holds long positions in ETH, ZEC, and HYPE perpetual contracts, with a total position value of nearly $45 million. His ETH long position is worth $34.87 million, with an unrealized profit of $862,000; his HYPE long position is worth $8.43 million, with an unrealized profit of $130,000. His total accumulated unrealized profit in the past week has exceeded $2.538 million.

January 18th, BitMine Chairman and Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee said in an interview with CNBC, "From the overall market perspective, I think the first five trading days of January's rise is good news. This is a very good sign for the whole year, and it gives us greater upside potential for the S&P 500 to reach 7700 points.""The volatility in the financial sector, overall market, and crypto market in the past few days partially reflects the impact of policy factors. Washington is trying to limit credit card rates, and if this policy is implemented, I think it will have an impact on the financial industry as it will weaken the ability of financial institutions to provide credit to a diverse set of consumers.""At the same time, the progress of the 'Clarity Act' is very bullish news for the crypto industry. The crypto market suffered a heavy blow in October last year, so we believe that as time goes on and we gradually move away from the impact point, the market will experience a significant recovery.""Therefore, we are bullish on Bitcoin. We believe that Bitcoin is likely to hit a new all-time high this year; at the same time, our attitude towards Ethereum may be more positive, and we expect Ethereum to outperform Bitcoin."

January 18th, Solana Mobile project leader Emmett posted on the X platform, stating, "In addition to existing anti-bot measures, the team is actively identifying some additional Seeker clusters. These accounts will be removed from the initial SKR airdrop distribution and returned to a future airdrop pool. We do not intend to publicly disclose the specific detection methods, but please rest assured that we have been paying attention and have been monitoring for some time.""We hope SKR will be launched fairly and ultimately end up in the hands of users and developers who truly drive the platform forward. This is advantageous for the vast majority of buyers who purchase Seeker for actual use."

January 18th, Ethereum founder Vitalik posted, stating, "An important aspect of 'trustlessness,' 'escape-hatch-freeness,' and 'sovereignty,' which has long been underestimated, is the simplicity of the protocol. Even if a protocol is super decentralized, with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and has 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, where nodes use quantum-secure peerda and stark to fully validate everything, but if the protocol is a clumsy mess composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five forms of cryptic doctorate-level cryptography, ultimately the protocol will fail to pass all three tests: not fully trustless, not fully sovereign, and not very secure."One concern I have about Ethereum protocol development is that we may be too eager to add new features to meet specific needs, even if these features make the protocol bloated, or introduce entirely new interactive components or complex cryptographic technologies as key dependencies. This may bring short-term feature upgrades, but it will severely compromise the protocol's long-term sovereignty. The core issue is that if we measure protocol changes based on "how much change to the existing protocol," then to maintain backward compatibility, adding functions will far outnumber removing functions, and the protocol will inevitably become bloated over time. To address this issue, Ethereum's development process needs a clear "simplify" / "garbage collection" mechanism.We hope that client developers will no longer have to deal with all old versions of the Ethereum protocol. This can be left to older version clients running in Docker containers to handle. In the long run, I hope that Ethereum's pace of change will slow down. I think, for various reasons, this is ultimately inevitable. The initial fifteen years should be seen as a growth stage, where we explored many ideas and observed which ones were effective, which were useful, and which were not. We should strive to prevent those useless parts from becoming a permanent drag on the Ethereum protocol."

January 18th, according to the Validator Queue tracking website validatorqueue data, the current queue waiting to join the Ethereum PoS network ETH has risen to 2,596,246, worth approximately $8.61 billion, with an expected activation delay of about 45 days and 2 hours. The main reason is that BitMine recently staked a large amount of ETH it holds.Meanwhile, the Ethereum PoS network's unstaking queue has been cleared, and there are currently no users opting to redeem ETH from staking.

January 18th, Vietnamese police arrested five suspects accused of operating a cryptocurrency scam syndicate in the Da Nang area. Vietnamese police stated that these suspects were based in Cambodia and engaged in cryptocurrency scam activities. The scam is said to have imitated the Nasdaq exchange, with the suspects embezzling 1.4 billion Vietnamese dong (approximately $53,280). The group used Zalo and Telegram to create dozens of fake accounts, post false trading activities, pose as investment experts to deceive victims into investing, and falsely report profits. After embezzling the funds, this money was transferred through multiple bank accounts and ultimately converted into cryptocurrency to conceal its source.

January 18th, ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood stated, "The experience of the past few years tells us that the trend of declining inflation has been very clear. However, inflation has remained stagnant in the official report data. Many people are wondering, with current market valuations close to historical highs, if this looks like a prelude to a pullback. Looking back at history, starting from the 1990s until around 1997, and the early 2000s, during the process of declining valuation multiples, the market still experienced very strong gains. We must assume that valuations will be compressed, and this compression assumption is included in the bottom-up analysis of each company."Nevertheless, we remain fairly optimistic about the inflation outlook for several main reasons: first is oil prices, and second is housing prices. You can see that homebuilder KB Home has already reduced home prices by 7%, with other companies following suit. In addition, there is a significant improvement in productivity, and unit labor costs are decreasing significantly. Therefore, there are currently multiple deflationary pressures. The last factor I want to mention is technology."Our focus is entirely on technology-driven innovation, covering robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence (especially), blockchain technology, and multiomic sequencing in the healthcare field. We believe that inflation data is likely to be lower than market expectations."

January 18th, the probability of "Bitcoin reaching $100,000 in January" on Polymarket is currently at 43%. Additionally, the probability of it reaching $105,000 is 15%, dropping to $85,000 is 15%, and dropping to $80,000 is 5%.

January 18, Bybit announced that Elsa (ELSA) will be listed in the spot trading section.