Odaily Planet Daily reports that Michael Saylor posted on the X platform that Strategy has added a BTC Rating metric to its official website. According to Chaitanya Jain, Head of Bitcoin Product Strategy at Strategy, the BTC Rating metric is calculated as: (Bitcoin Reserves - Debt - Preferred Stock + USD Reserves) / Market Capitalization, which is the ratio of net Bitcoin reserves to the company's market capitalization.

According to Coinglass data, if ETH falls below $3,161, the total liquidation intensity of long positions on major CEXs will reach $993 million. Conversely, if ETH breaks through $3,462, the total liquidation intensity of short positions on major CEXs will reach $989 million.

Huoxun Finance reported on January 18th that Vitalik Buterin, in an article on the X platform, stated that a crucial and long-underestimated aspect of "trustlessness," "passing the 'leave test,'" and "self-sovereignty" is protocol simplicity. Even if a protocol has hundreds of thousands of nodes, 49% Byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything through quantum-resistant peerdas and starks, if the protocol is a massive mess of hundreds of thousands of lines of code and five PhD-level cryptographic techniques, then this protocol will ultimately fail all three tests: It lacks trustlessness because users must trust a small group of highly skilled individuals to inform them of the protocol's properties. It fails the "leave test" because if the existing client team leaves, a new team will find it extremely difficult to achieve the same level of quality. It lacks self-sovereignty because even the most technically capable person cannot inspect and understand it, meaning it doesn't fully belong to the users. Simultaneously, its security is lower because every part of the protocol, especially when it can interact with other parts in complex ways, is at risk of protocol collapse. One concern I have about Ethereum protocol development is that we might be too eager to add new features to meet highly specific needs, even if these features bloat the protocol or add entirely new types of interactive components or complex cryptography as key dependencies. This might be beneficial for short-term feature gains, but it's highly destructive to maintaining long-term self-sovereignty and creating a century-old decentralized superstructure that transcends empires and the rise and fall of ideologies. The core issue is that if protocol changes are judged by "how much they modify the existing protocol," then the desire to maintain backward compatibility means far more additions than subtractions, inevitably leading to protocol bloat over time. To address this, the Ethereum development process needs a clear "simplification" or "garbage collection" function. "Simplification" has three metrics: 1. Minimizing the total number of lines of code in the protocol. 2. Avoiding unnecessary dependencies on fundamentally complex technical components. 3. Adding more invariants: core properties the protocol can rely on, such as EIP-6780 (removing selfdestruct), which adds the property that at most N storage slots can be changed per block, greatly simplifying client development. Garbage collection can be piecemeal or large-scale. The piecemeal approach attempts to simplify existing functionality, making it more concise and logical. An example of large-scale garbage collection is replacing PoW with PoS. Another approach is "Rosetta-style backward compatibility," where complex but rarely used features remain available but are "degraded" to smart contract code rather than part of the mandatory protocol, so new client developers don't have to deal with them. For example, upgrading to a fully native account abstraction could eliminate all older transaction types; existing pre-compiled code could be replaced with EVM or RISC-V code; and eventually, the virtual machine could be changed from EVM to RISC-V. Ultimately, the goal is for client developers to no longer need to deal with all older versions of the Ethereum protocol. In the long run, the pace of Ethereum's change should slow down, and efforts should be made to prevent useless parts from becoming permanent drags on the Ethereum protocol.

Ethereum hit a new all-time high on Friday, processing 2.88 million transactions in a single day. (Cointelegraph)

According to Huoxun Finance on January 18th, Alex Thorn, Head of Research at Galaxy, published an article on the X platform analyzing the upcoming Senate Banking Committee vote on the Crypto Market Structure Bill on January 15th. He stated that the current Senate vote is 53 to 47, but a bill typically requires 60 votes to pass, meaning Republicans still need 7-10 Democratic senators to pass the bill. Thorn added that the Crypto Market Structure Bill is significant, addressing issues such as the classification of DeFi under anti-money laundering rules, the handling of stablecoin reserve yields, protection of non-custodial developers, and the SEC's power to authorize or restrict token issuance. If passed, it would be a major bullish catalyst for cryptocurrency adoption. If it fails to pass, while the overall impact on the fundamentals of the crypto industry would be relatively small, it could lead to negative market sentiment.